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Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. Whereunto is annexed A comparative admonition to London. A Iove Mvsa. By Tho. Nashe.
At London. Printed by James Roberts, and are to be sold by Andrew Wise, at his shop in Paul’s Churchyard, at the sign of the Angel. Anno. 1593.
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To the most honoured and virtuous beautified lady, the Lady Elizabeth Carey, wife to the thrice magnanimous and noble-descended knight, Sir George Carey, Knight Marshal, etc. Excellent accomplished court-glorifying Lady, give me leave with the sportive sea porpoises preludiately a little to play before the storm of my tears, to make my prayer ere I proceed to my sacrifice. Lo, for an oblation to the rich-burnished shrine of your virtue, a handful of Jerusalem’s mummianized earth (in a few sheets of waste-paper enwrapped) I here (humiliate) offer up at your feet. More embellished should my present be, were my ability more abundant. Your illustrate Ladyship ere this (I am persuaded) hath beheld a bad flourish with a text-pen; all my performance herein is no better. I doubt you will condemn it for worse. Wit hath his dregs as well as wine, divinity his dross. Expect some tares in this treatise of tears. Far unable are my dim osprey eyes to look clearly against the sun of God’s truth. An easy matter is it for any man to cut me (like a diamond) with mine own dust. A young imperfect practitioner am I in Christ’s school. Christ accepteth the will for the deed. Weak are my deeds; great is my will. O, that our deeds only should be seen, and our will die invisible! Long hath my intended will (renowned Madam) been addressed to adore you. But words, to that my resolved will, were negligent servants. My woeinfirmed wit conspired against me with my fortune. My impotent care-crazed style cast off his light wings, and betook him to wooden stilts. All agility it forgot, and gravelled itself in gross-brained formality. Now a little is it revived, but not so revived that it hath utterly shook off his dank upper mourning garment. Were it effectually recured, in my soul-infused lines I would show that I perfectly lived, and in them your praises should live, whereas now, only amongst the dead I live in them, and they dead all those that look upon them. That which my tear-stubbed pen in this theological subject hath attempted is no more but the coarse-spun web of discontent, a quintessence of holy complaint extracted out of my true cause of condolement. Peruse it, judicial Madam, and something in it shall you find that may pierce. The world hath renowned you for religion, piety, bountihood, modesty, and sobriety (rare enduements in these reckless days of security). Divers well-deserving poets have consecrated their endeavours to your praise. Fame’s eldest favourite, Master Spenser, in all his writings high prizeth you. To the eternizing of the heroical family of the Careys, my choicest studies have I tasked. Than you that high-allied house hath not a more dearadopted ornament. To the supportive perpetuating of your canonized reputation, wholly this book have I destined. Vouchsafe it benign hospitality in your closet, with slight interview of idle hours, and more polished labours of mine ere long shall salute you. Some complete history I will shortly go through with, wherein your perfections shall be the chief argument. To none of all those majestical wit-forestalling worthies of your sex myself do I apply, but you alone. The cunning courtship of fair words can never overwork me to cast away honour on any. I hate those female braggarts that contend to have all the Muses beg at their doors, and, with doves, delight evermore to look themselves in the glass of vainglory, yet by their sides wear continually Barbary purses, which never ope to any but pedantical parasites.
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Divine Lady, you I must and will memorize more especially, for you recompense learning extraordinarily. Pardon my presumption, lend patience to my prolixity, and if anything in all please, think it was compiled to please you. This I avouch, no line of it was laid down without awful looking back to your frown. To write in divinity I would not have adventured, if aught else might have consorted with the regenerate gravity of your judgment. Your thoughts are all holy; holy is your life; in your heart lives no delight but of heaven. Far be it I should proffer to unhallow them with any profane papers of mine. The care I have to work your holy content, I hope God hath ordained, to call me home sooner unto him. Varro saith the philosophers held two hundred and eight opinions of felicity; two hundred and eight felicities to me shall it be, if I have framed any one line to your liking. Most resplendent Lady, encourage me, favour me, countenance me in this, and something ere long I will aspire to, beyond the common mediocrity. Your admired Ladyship’s most devoted, Tho. Nashe.
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To the Reader. Nil nisi flere libet, Gentles, here is no joyful subject towards; if you will weep, so it is. I have nothing to spend on you but passion. A hundred unfortunate farewells to fantastical satirism. In those veins heretofore have I mis-spent my spirit, and prodigally conspired against good hours. Nothing is there now so much in my vows as to be at peace with all men, and make submissive amends where I have most displeased. Not basely fearblasted or constraintively overruled, but purely pacificatory suppliant for reconciliation and pardon, do I sue to the principallest of them gainst whom I professed utter enmity. Even of Master Doctor Harvey I heartily desire the like, whose fame and reputation (though through some precedent injurious provocations, and fervent incitements of young heads) I rashly assailed, yet now better advised, and of his perfections more confirmedly persuaded, unfeignedly I entreat of the whole world, from my pen his worths may receive no impeachment. All acknowledgments of abundant scholarship, courteous wellgoverned behaviour, and ripe-experienced judgment do I attribute unto him. Only with his mild gentle moderation hereunto hath he won me. Take my invective against him in that abject nature that you would do the railing of a sophister in the schools, or a scolding lawyer at the bar, which none but fools will wrest to defame. As the title of this book is Christ’s Tears, so be this epistle the tears of my pen. Many things have I vainly set forth whereof now it repenteth me. St. Augustine writ a whole book of his retractations. Nothing so much do I retract as that whereinsoever I have scandalized the meanest. Into some splenative veins of wantonness heretofore have I foolishly relapsed, to supply my private wants; of them no less do I desire to be absolved than the rest, and to God & man do I promise an unfeigned conversion. Two or three trivial volumes of mine at this instant are under the printer’s hands, ready to be published, which being long bungled up before this, I must crave to be included in the catalogue of mine excuse. To a little more wit have my increasing years reclaimed me than I had before. Those that have been perverted by any of my works, let them read this, and it shall thrice more benefit them. The autumn I imitate, in shedding my leaves with the trees, and so doth the peacock shed his tail. Buy who list, contemn who list; I leave every reader his free liberty. If the best sort of men I content, I am satisfiedly successful. Farewell all those that wish me well; others wish I more wit to. Tho. Nashe.
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Friendly reader, some faults there be my pen hath escaped in hasty writing, which I am more earnestly to crave pardon of at thy hands, as in folio 15, page 1, where I talk of Peter’s forswearing, whereas in the course of the New Testament it was long after Christ’s weeping over Jerusalem. Folio 17, page 2, when I say, the walls of Jericho at the 3. sound fell down, it should be the 7. sound. The printer’s faults are these. Folio 11, page 1, line 15, for gardener, read guardian. Folio 16, page 2, for Vbique cuiusque animus, est ibi animat, read Vbi cuiusque animus est, ibi animat. Folio 20, page 2, line 17, for slaughter-sack, read slaughter-stack. Fol. 37, page 2, line 12, for explement, read expletement. Fol. 51, page 2, line 13, for Esau, read Cain. Fol. 57, page 1, line 4, for skins, read sins. Fol. 62, page 2, line 2, for Patris, read Patres. Fol 70, page 2, line 13, for her, read their. Fol. 79, page 1, line 10, for primipalship, read principalship. Fol. 89, page 1, line 4, for negligetur, read negligitur.
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Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem Psal. 9:16. Math. 3.
Jerem. 1. Philip. 4. Wisd. 10.
Since these be the days of dolour and heaviness, wherein (as holy David saith) the Lord is known by executing judgment, and the axe of his anger is put to the root of the tree, and his fan is in his hand to purge his floor, I suppose it shall not be amiss to write something of mourning, for London to hearken counsel of her great-grandmother, Jerusalem. Omnipotent Saviour, it is thy tears I intend to write of, those affectionate tears which in the 23. and 24. of Matthew thou weep’st over Jerusalem and her temple; be present with me (I beseech thee), personating the passion of thy love. O, dew thy spirit plentifully into my ink, and let some part of thy divine dreariment live again in mine eyes. Teach me how to weep as thou wep’st, & rent my heart in twain with the extremity of ruth. I hate in thy name to speak coldly to a quick-witted generation. Rather let my brains melt all to ink, and the floods of affliction drive out mine eyes before them, than I should be dull and leaden in describing the dolour of thy love. Far be from me any ambitious hope of the vain merit of art; may that living vehemence I use to lament only proceed from a heaven-bred hatred of uncleanness and corruption. Mine own wit I clean disinherit; thy fiery cloven-tongued inspiration be my muse. Lend my words the forcible wings of the lightnings, that they may pierce unawares into the marrow and reins of my readers. Newmint my mind to the likeness of thy lowliness; file away the superfluous affectation of my profane puffed-up phrase, that I may be thy pure simple orator. I am a child (as thy holy Jeremy said), & know not how to speak, yet Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat, I can do all things through the help of him that strengtheneth me. The tongues of infants it is thou that makest eloquent, and teachest the heart understanding. Grant me (that am a babe and an infant in the mysteries of divinity) the gracious favour to suck at the breasts of thy sacred revelation, to utter something that may move secure England to true sorrow and contrition. All the powers of my soul (assembled in their perfectest array) shall stand waiting on thy incomprehensible wisdom for arguments, as poor young birds stand attending on their dam’s bill for sustenance. Now help, now direct, for now I transform myself from myself, to be thy unworthy speaker to the world. It is not unknown by how many & sundry ways God spake by visions, dreams, prophecies and wonders to his chosen Jerusalem, only to move his chosen Jerusalem wholly to cleave unto him. Visions, dreams, prophecies and wonders were in vain; this gorgeous strumpet Jerusalem, too too much presuming of the promises of old, went awhoring after her own inventions; she thought the Lord unseparately tied to his temple, & that he could never be divorced from the ark of his covenant, that, having bound himself with an oath to Abraham, he could not (though he would) removed the law out of Judah, or his judgment-seat from Mount Shiloh. They erred most temptingly & contemptuously, for God even of stones (as Christ told them afterward) was able to raise up children to Abraham. But what course took the high father of heaven & earth, after he had unfruitfully practised all these means of visions, dreams, wonders & prophecies? There is a parable in the 21. of Matthew of a certain householder that planted a vineyard, hedged it round about, made a wine-press therein, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a strange country. When the time of fruit drew near, he sent
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his servants to the husbandmen to receive the increase thereof. The husbandmen made no more ado, but (his servants coming) beat one, killed another, and stoned the third. Again he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did the like unto them. Last of all, he sent his own son, saying, They will reverence my son, but they handled him far worse than the former. The householder that planted the vineyard and hedged it round about was Israel’s merciful Jehovah, who in Israel planted his church, or his wine-press, made it a people of no people, and a nation beyond expectation. Long did he bless them, and multiply their seed on the face of the earth, as the sand of the sea or the stars of heaven; from all their enemies he delivered them, & brought their name to be a byword of terror to the kingdoms round about them; their rivers overflowed with milk & honey, their garners were filled to the brim; every man had well-springs of oil & wine in his house, and finally, there was no complaint heard in their streets. The time of fruit drew near, wherein much was to be required of them to whom much was given; he sent his servants, the prophets, to demand his rent, or tribute of thanksgiving, at their hands. Some of them they beat, others they killed, others they stoned, and this was all the thanksgiving they returned. And then he sent other prophets or servants mo than the first, & they did the like unto them, yet could not all this cause him proceed rashly unto revenge. The Lord is a God of long patience and suffering, nor will he draw out his sword unadvisedly in his indignation. Still did he love them, because once he had loved them, & the more their ingratitude was, the more his grace abounded; he neglected the death of his servants in comparison of the salvation of them he accounted his sons. He excused them himself unto himself, and said, Peradventure they took not these my servants I sent for my servants, but for seducers and deceivers, and thereupon entreated them so uncourteously; I will send mine only natural son to them, whom they (being my adopted sons) cannot choose but reverence & listen to. This his natural son was Christ Jesus, whom he sent from heaven to persuade with these husbandmen; he sent him not with a strong power of angels, to punish their pride and ingratitude, as he might; he sent him not royally trained & accompanied, like an embassador of his greatness, nor gave he him any commission to expostulate proudly of injuries, but to deal humbly and meekly with them, & not to constrain but entreat them. He sent his own only son alone, like a sheep to the slaughter, or as a lamb should be made a legate to the wolves. When he came on earth, what was his behaviour? Did he first show himself to the chief of these husbandmen, the scribes and Pharisees? Did he take up any stately lodging according to his degree? Was he sumptuous in his attire, prodigal in his fare, or haughty in his looks, as embassadors wont to be? None of these; instead of the scribes and Pharisees, he first disclosed himself to poor fishermen; for his stately lodging he took up a crib or a manger, and afterward the house of a carpenter; his attire was as base as might be, his fare ordinary, his looks lowly. He kept company with publicans and sinners, the very outcast of the people; yet in their company was he not idle, but made all he spake or did preparatives to his embassy. If any nobleman (though never so high-descended) should come alone to a king or queen in embassage, without pomp, without followers or the apparel of his state, who would
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receive him, who would credit him, who would not scorn him? It was necessary that Christ (coming thus alone from the high commander of all sovereignties, the controller of all principalities and powers) should have some apparent testimony of his excellency. According to the vanity of man, he thought it not meet to place his magnificence in earthly boast, as in the pride of shame, which is apparel, or in the multitude of men after him, for so met wicked Esau his brother Jacob, but in working miracles above the imagination of man, and in preaching the gospel with power and authority, whereby, after he had throughly confirmed himself to be the owner of the vineyard’s true son, and that these ill husbandmen, the Jews, should have no credible or truthlike exception left them (that they took him for a counterfeit, or colourable practiser), he went into their chief assemblies, and there (to the high priests & heads of their synagogues) freely delivered his message, declared from whence he came, gently expostulated their ill dealing, desired them to have care of themselves, told them the danger of their obstinacy, and wooed them (with many fair promises) to repent and be converted. All this prevailed not; they set him at naught, as they rejected his father’s other servants, the prophets, wherefore his last refuge was to deal plainly with them, and explain to the full what plagues and wars were entering in at their gates for their disloyalty and doggedness. In the 11. of Matthew, he pronounceth grievous woes to Chorazin and Bethsaida; in divers other places he intermixeth curses with blessings, tempers oil with vinegar, tears with threats, denounceth sighing, and in his sighs well-near swooneth, even as a father constrained to give sentence on his own son. In the 13. of Luke, he telleth how often he had been an intercessor for the reprieve of their punishment. The husbandman, which is my father (saith he) hath come many years together to a fig-tree in his vineyard, to demand fruit of it, and found none. What hath hindered him from cutting it down but I, who have took upon me to be the dresser of the vineyard, and desired him to spare it this year, and that year, and I would prune it, dung it, and dig round about it, and then if it brought not forth fruit, let him deal with it as he pleased? Almost this 30 year have I pruned it, dunged it, digged round about it, that is, reproved, preached, exhorted with all the wooing words I could, endeavouring to mollify, melt & pierce your hearts, yet all will not serve; my prayers and my pains, instead of bringing forth repentance in you, bring forth repentance in myself. As I said before, no remedy or sign of any breath of hope was left in their commonwealth’s sin-surfeited body, but the malady of their incredulity over-mastered heavenly physic. To desperate diseases must desperate medicines be applied. When neither the white flag or the red which Tamburlaine advanced at the siege of any city would be accepted of, the black flag was set up, which signified there was no mercy to be looked for, and that the misery marching towards them was so great that their enemy himself (which was to execute it) mourned for it. Christ, having offered the Jews the white flag of forgiveness and remission, and the red flag of shedding his blood for them, when those two might not take effect, nor work any yielding remorse in them, the black flag of confusion and desolation was to succeed for the object of their obduration. This black flag is waved or displayed in the 23. of Matthew, where, directing his speech to his disciples and the multitude against the scribes & Pharisees that were the princes of the people, he first urgeth the infamous disagreement of their lives and their doctrines,
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August. tom. 10 homil. 5.
which, that it should breed no scandalous backsliding in the hearts of his hearers, he inserteth this caution, Do as they say, not as they do. And to the like effect saith St. Augustine, Sermo Dei proferat eum peccator, proferat eum iustus, sermo Dei est, inculpabilis est, The word of God, be it preached by hypocrite or saint, is the word of God, and not to be despised or disannulled. Next this, he pronounceth eight terrible woes against them for their eightfold hypocrisy & blindness, besides other fearful comminations wherein he threatens that all the righteous blood which was shed from the time of Abel the righteous unto the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias, that was slain betwixt the temple and the altar, should come upon them, should call and exclaim on their souls for vengeance, stain the sky with cloddered exhalations, interrupt the sun in his course, and make it stick fast in the congealed mud of gory clouds, yea, dim & overcast God sitting in his throne, till he had took some astonishing satisfaction for it. Then on the sudden starting back, as over-examining the words he had said, and condemning himself (in his thought) for being so bitter, he presently weepeth, and excuseth it in these terms, that it was not his fault, but theirs: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, that is, which art guilty of all the accusations my father till this time would not in pity lay against thee, yea, feared to be cruel in once suspecting thee of, though now they are proved, How often would I have gathered thy children together, as the hen gathereth her chickens together under her wings, and ye would not! How often would I have revoked, reduced, & brought you into the right way, but you would not! Therefore your habitation shall be left desolate. So that in these words most evidently you see he cleareth himself, and leaveth them unexcusable. The more to penetrate and enforce, let us suppose Christ in a continued oration thus pleading with them. Jerusalem, the daughter of my people, I am sore vexed and compassionate for thee; Jerusalem, the midst of the earth, the mother of us all, in the midst of whom I have wrought my salvation; Jerusalem, that for all the good seed I have sown in thee affordest nothing but stones to throw at my prophets, thou that slayest whom I send to save thee, & imprisonest any man that wisheth thy peace, thy sins are so great that when I look on thee mine eyes can scarce persuade me that thou standest, but that thou art sunk down like Sodom, and entombed in ashes like Gomorrha. O, let me pity thee, for I love thee impatiently. A thousand shapes of thy confusion muster before mine eyes, & the pains on the cross I am to sustain cannot be so great pains unto me as to think on the ruin and massacre that is already travelling towards thee. Famine, the sword, and the pestilence have all three sworn and conspired against thee; thou (one poor city) by these three unrelenting enemies shalt be overcome. Ehue, quantus equis, quantus viris adest sudor, Alas, what huge sweat and toil is at hand for horse and man. Here do I weep in vain, for no man regardeth me, no man waileth with me. Here do I prophesy that my weeping in vain shall be the cause of a hundred thousand fathers & mothers weeping in vain. O, that I did weep in vain, that your defilements & pollution gave me no true cause of deplorement! Often wished I that I might have said to mine
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eyes and ears they lied when they told me what they have seen and heard of thy treasons. I wished that I might be as wretched as the damned, so my senses therein were deceived. I am not deceived; ‘tis thou that deceivest thy Saviour, and deceivest thyself, to cleave unto Satan. Satan, refrain thine odious embraces; the bosom of Jerusalem is mine; touch not the body contracted to me. Improbe tolle manus, quam tangis nostra futura est, She will touch him; he stretcheth not out his hand to her, but she breaketh violently from me to run ravishedly into his rugged arms. Alas, the one half of my soul, why wilt thou backslide thus? I love and can have no love again; I love thee for thy good; thou lov’st him that flatters thee for thy hurt. What less thing than to believe, and to be saved? How canst thou believe, & wilt not hear? Thy prayers are frivolous unto God if thou deniest to hear God; he must first hear God that will be heard of God. I have heard quietly all thy upbraidings, reproofs and derisions, as when thou said’st I was a drunkard, and possessed with a devil, that I cast out devils by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of devils, that I blasphemed, was mad, & knew not what I spake; nor was I any more offended with these contumelies than when thou called’st me the son of a carpenter. If I give ear to all your bitterness, will not you vouchsafe me a little audience when I bless you? O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that stonest and astoniest thy prophets with thy perverseness, that lendest stony ears to thy teachers, and with thine iron breast drawest unto thee nothing but the adamant of God’s anger, what shall I do to mollify thee? The rain mollifieth hard stones; O, that the stormy tempest of my tears might soften thy stony heart! Were it not harder than stone, sure ere this I had broken and bruised it with the often beating of my exhortations upon it. Moses struck the rock, and water gushed out of it; I (that am greater than Moses) have stricken you with threats, and you have not mourned. O, ye heavens, be amazed at this, be afraid and utterly confounded; my people have drunk out of a rock in the wilderness, & ever since had rocky hearts. Yet will the rocks tremble when my thunder falls upon them. The mason with his axe hews and carves them at his pleasure. All the thunder of judgements which I spend on this stony Jerusalem cannot make her to tremble, or refrain from stoning my prophets. Should I rain stones upon her, with them she would arm herself against my holy ones. Little doth she consider that all my prophets are embassadors, and the wronging of an embassador amongst mortal men is the breaking of the law of nations, which breach or wrong no king or monarch but (at his coronation) is sworn to revenge. If earthly kings revenge any little wrong done to their embassadors, how much more shall the king of all kings revenge the death and slaughterdom of his embassadors? The angels in heaven, as they are the Lord’s embassadors (in regard of their own safety) would prosecute it, though he should overslip it. The devil that useth daily to solicit the murderer’s own conscience for vengeance against himself, will he spare to put the Lord in mind of his ancient decree, A murderer shall not live? God said unto Cain: The voice of thy brother Abel’s blood cryeth to me out of the earth; that is, not only Abel’s own blood, but the blood of all the sons that were to issue from his loins, cry unto me out of the earth. It is said in the 6. of Genesis, Whosoever shall shed human blood, his blood shall be shed likewise. Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth, much more for
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life, shall be repaid, and this equity or amends the veriest beggar or contemptiblest creature on the earth (cut off before his time) shall be sure to have. If I do them right that in their own enmities lavish their lives, shall I let their blood be trodden to dirt under foot, and be blown back by the winds into the crannies of the earth (when it offers to sprinkle up to heaven), who in my service spend their lives? At my head Jerusalem threw stones when she stoned my heralds. Who stabbeth or defaceth the picture of a king, but would do the like to the king himself if he might do it as conveniently? Every prophet or messenger from the Lord representeth the person of the Lord, as a herald representeth his King’s person, and is the right picture of his royalty. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, what thou hast done to the least of my prophets thou hast done unto me likewise; my prophets thou hast stoned; me likewise thou hast stoned, and withstood. The very stones in the street shall rise up in judgement against thee. By the old law, he that had blasphemed, reviled his parents or committed adultery was stoned to death by the prophets and elders; thou hast blasphemed, reviled thy (spiritual) parents, committed adultery with thine own abominations, and lo, contrariwise, thine elders and prophets thou stonest to death. Can I see this, and not rise up in wrath against thee? For this shalt thou grind the stones in the mill with Samson, and whet thy teeth upon the stones for hunger, and if thou askest any man bread, he shall give thee stones to eat. The dogs shall lick thy blood on the stones like Jezebel’s, & not a stone be found to cover thee when thou art dead. One stone of thy temple shall not be left upon another that shall not be thrown down. The stone which thy foolish builders refused shall be made the headstone of the corner. Your hearts (which are temples of stone) I will forswear forever to dwell in. There shall be no David any more amongst you, that with a stone sent out of a sling shall strike the chief champion of the Philistines in the forehead, and finally, you shall worship stocks and stones, for I will be no longer your God. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, all this shall betide thee, because thou stonest the prophets, and killest them that are sent unto thee. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge: your fathers took hard courses against the prophets, killed those I sent unto them, and if you had no other crime but that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets, it were too too sufficient for your subversion, but you yourselves have stoned the prophets, and killed those I sent unto you; not only you yourselves but your sons (for this) shall be put to the edge of the sword. The bloodthirsty & deceitful man shall not live out half his days. Who strikes with the sword shall perish with the sword. He that but hateth his brother is a homicide. What is he then that slayeth his brother; nay more, what is he that slayeth God’s brother? Not one that believeth in me, and doth my will, but is my brother and sister. In slaying them that are sent to declare the will of God, you resist the will of God, and are guilty of all their damnations which are yet unconverted, whom, living, their preaching might have reduced. The violating of any of the commandments is death; Thou shat not kill is one of the principal commandments; your fault at the first sight deserveth hell-fire. What do you but proclaim open war against heaven when you destroy or overthrow any of the
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temples of the Holy Ghost (which are men’s bodies)? They are the tabernacles which the Lord hath chosen (by his Spirit) to dwell in. But the bodies of my saints and prophets (which you slay and stone) are no trivial ordinary tabernacles such as Peter, my disciple, would have had me to make in the wilderness for Moses, Elias and myself, but tabernacles like the tabernacle at Jerusalem, where I have ordained my name to be worshipped. Their words, as my words, I will have worshipped; their heads are the mounts from whence I speak to you in a holy flame, as to your forefathers wandering in the desert. I have told you heretofore they are the salt of the earth with whose prayers and supplications, if this mass of sin were not seasoned, it would savour so detestably in God’s nostrils, he were never able to endure it. They are the eyes and the light of the world; if the eye lose his light, all the whole body is blind, and hence it came that they were surnamed seers, for they only foresaw, prayed, & provided for the people. I tell you plainly, if it were possible for you to pluck the sun out of heaven, and you should do it, and so consequently leave all the world in darkness, you should not be liable to so much blame as you are now in killing them I send unto you. They are your seers, your prophets, your chief eyes, which you have slain, destroyed and put out. Was Cain a vagabond on the face of the earth for killing but one Abel? Ten thousand just Abels have you slain, that were more near, and ought to have been more dear, to you than brothers, and shall I not destitute your habitation for it, and scatter you as vagabonds throughout the empires of the world? As you have made no conscience to stone my prophets and slay them I sent unto you, so shall the strange lords that lead you captive, and they amongst whom many hundred years you shall sojourn, make no conscience to cut your throats for your treasure, and give a hundred of you together to their fencers and executioners to try their weapons on for a wager, and win masteries with deep wounding you. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, deep woes & calamities hast thou incurred in stoning my prophets and slaying them I sent unto thee. How often would I have gathered thy children together when they went astray? How often would I have brought them home into the true sheepfold when I met them straying? I came into the world to no other end but to gather together the lost sheep of Israel. You are the flock and sheep of my pasture; when I would have gathered you together, you would not hear my voice, but hardened your hearts. You gather yourselves to counsel against me every time I seek to call you or to gather you. Deny, if you can, that I sent not my prophets (in all ages) to gather you; that with my rod and my staff of correction I have not sought (from time to time) to gather you; that by benefits and manifold good turns I have not tried (all I might) to tie you or gather you unto me; lastly, that in mine own person I have not practised a thousand ways to gather you to repentance and amendment of life. If you should deny it, & I not contradict it, the devil (my utterest enemy) would confirm it. Let me speak truly and not vauntingly (although it be lawful to boast in goodness), such hath always been my care to gather you that I thought it not enough to gather myself, but I have prayed to my father to join more labourers and gatherers with me, to reap and gather in his harvest. How often have I gathered the multitude together, and spoke unto them? When the people were flocked or gathered unto me out of all cities, and had
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nothing to eat, I fed them miraculously with five barley-loaves and two fishes. I would not have showed the wonders of my godhead but to gather you together. The first gathering that I made was of poor seafaring men, whom I have preferred to be mine apostles.
Tob. 4:10.
Would you have been gathered together when I would have had you, you had gathered to yourselves the kingdom of heaven, and all the riches thereof. Now what have you gathered to yourselves but ten thousand testimonies in the Son of God’s testimony that he desired and besought you to suffer yourselves to be gathered by him, and you would not? Soldiers that fight scatteringly, and do not gather themselves in rank or battle array, shall never win the day. If you knew how strong and full of stratagems the devil were, with how many legions of lustful desires he cometh embattled against you, what secret ambushes of temptations he hath laid to entrap you, then would you gather yourselves into one body to resist him, then would you gather yourselves together in prayer to withstand him, then would you gather for the poor, which is, to gather for solders to fight against him. Eleemosyna a morte liberat, et non patitur hominem ire in tenebras, Almsdeeds deliver a man from death, and keepeth his soul from seeing confusion. As water quencheth fire (saith the wise man), so alms-giving resisteth sin. And if it resisteth sin, it resisteth the devil, which is the father of sin. All my father’s angels stand gathered together about his throne; no bread is made but of grains of corn gathered together; no building is raised but of a number of stones glued and gathered together. There is no perfect society or city but of a number of men gathered together. Geese (which are the simplest of all fowls) gather themselves together, go together, fly together. Bees in one hive hold their consistory together. The stars in heaven do shine together. What is a man if the parts of his body be disparted, and not incorporated and essentiate together? What is the sea but an assembly or gathering together of waters, and so the earth a congestion or heaping up of gross matter together? A wood or forest, but an host of trees encamped together? A general council or parliament but a congregation or gathering together of special wise men, to consult about religion or laws? O, what a good thing is it (saith David) for brethren to live or be gathered together in unity! If there were no other thing to ratify the excellence of it but the evil of his diameter opposite, which is division or distraction, it were infinitely ample to establish the title of his dignity. Nor David, nor all the evils of division, nor all the instances of angels, bread, buildings, societies, geese, bees, stars, men, seas, councils, parliaments may conform these ungracious degenerates. They will not only not gather themselves into order (which I, their captain, might exact at their hands), but scorn to be directed, mustered and gathered by me, when with the mildest discipline I offer to marshal them. Sorry I am, Jerusalem, that my kindness and conversing with thee hath left thee without any cloak or cloud of defence. It shall not be laid to thy charge that thou wert ignorant and foolish, and knew’st not how to gather thyself into my family or household, the church, but that when thou might’st have been gathered or called, thou refused’st and contemned; neither shall it be imputed
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that thou went’st astray, but that, going astray, thou reviled’st and struck’st at him that would have gathered or brought thee into the right way. Ah, woe is me, that ever I opened my mouth to call thee or gather thee, for now (by opening my mouth, and thou stopping thine ears when I opened it) I have opened & enwidened hell-mouth to swallow thee and devour thee. I took flesh upon me to the end that hell (not Jerusalem) might perish under my hand. The vanquishment of that ugly nest of harpies hath been reserved as a work for me before all beginnings; now know I not which I may first confound, hell or Jerusalem, since both know me and have armed their foreheads against me. Blessed is thy land, O Jerusalem, for I was born in it. Cursed is thy land, O Jerusalem, for I was born in it. Born I am to do all countries good but thee. Thee I came principally to do good to, but thou resisteth the good I would do thee; thou interdicts and prohibits me with reproaches and threats from gathering thee & doing thee good. Of my birth thou reap’st no benefit but this, that I shall come at the last day to bear witness against thee. Blind and inconsiderate, what wilt thou do to thine enemy that thus entreatest thy friend, that thus rejectest thy Redeemer? O were thy sin (though not to be defended), yet any way excusable, it were somewhat. Why did I ever behold thee to make thee miserable, and mine eyes thus miserable in beholding?
Jerem. 9.
I might have beheld the innocent saints and angels, that would never have angered me, but rejoiced me; the cherubins and seraphins would uncessantly have praised me; I should not have prayed them to execute my will (for they would have done it with a beck), much less have solicited them as I do thee, to consent to save thyself. I should have but said the word to the senseless planets, and it had been done; to thy children (more senseless than the planets) can I not say that word which not only they will refuse to do, but deride. For this shall thine enemies gather themselves about thy city, and smite thee; the angels shall gather thee to the lake of fire and brimstone; thou shalt then gather thy brows together in howling and lamentation, and (as Jeremy said) The carcasses of thy dwellers shall lie as the dung in the field, or the handful after the mower, and none shall there be to gather them up. All this hadst thou prevented, if thou wouldst have permitted me to gather thee. I saw into thy frailty and infirmity, that thou wert not able to gather thyself; I took compassion on thee, because thou wert like sheep which had no shepherd. I forsook all my immortal pleasures and mind-ravishing melody to descend & make thee mine, to come and gather thee to the glory prepared for thee. The greatest work was this purpose of thy gathering that ever was undertaken in heaven or earth. Thus did I argument with myself, to salve thy imperfections of the not gathering thyself. The horse tameth not himself; the camel tameth not himself; the ox tameth not himself; the bear, the lion, the elephant tame not themselves. Then why should I require that man should tame, recall, bridle, bring under or gather himself? But as the horse, the ox, the camel, the bear, the lion, the elephant require man to tame them, so it is requisite that God should tame man, that God alone should gather him unto him. Content I was to take upon me that unthankful office of taming or gathering, but thou wert not content to be so tamed or gathered.
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It did not irk me so much that thou wert untamed or ungathered, as that (knowing thyself in that case) thou wert unwilling to be tamed and gathered. Thou couldst not despair of mine ability to tame thee & gather thee, for if man tameth the beasts he never made, shall not I gather thee, alter thee & tame thee, that made thee? Easy is my yoke and my burden is light; I would not have tamed thee, or tempted thee, above thy strength; only I would have curbed or reined thee a little to the right hand, kept thee from swallowing in sin with greediness. Suppose (as the tamer of all wild beasts) I had sometime used my whip or my goad, had it been so much? Your horses, which you tame and spur, and cut their mouths with reining, and finally kill with making carry heavy burdens many years together, you will not give so much reward to (when they are dead) as burial, but cast them to the fowls of the air to be deformedly torn in pieces; I (having tamed thee, and gathered thee home unto me) enfeoff thee with indefinite blessedness, (being dead a space) restore to thee not only thy flesh (in more purity), but the just number of thy hairs, install thee in eternity with mine angels, where thou shalt nevermore need to be gathered or tamed, where there shall be no adversity or tribulation that shall exercise or try thee, but eternal felicity to feed thee, and that without any care, forecast or plotting on thy part (such as in the maintenance of earthly weal is wont). I shall be to thee all in all, thy riches, thy strength, thine honour, thy patron, thy provider. Yet all this hope cannot move thee to consent to be tamed or gathered unto me. My voice which cryeth, Return, return; whither wanderest thou, long strayer? is troublesome and hateful unto thee; thou canst by no means digest it; it is thy adversary in the way, which since I have warned thee to agree with, and thou hast refused, it shall draw & hale thee unto judgement; the judge deliver thee to death, his sergeant; the sergeant to the devil (convicted souls’ jailer); thence shalt thou not escape till thou hast paid the utmost farthing. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, why shouldst thou gather and entangle thyself in so many unevitable snares, when (by gathering thyself under my wing) thou may’st avoid them? What have I required of thee but to gather thyself, & agree with my voice, thy adversary? Nothing but that thou wouldest have a care of thy health and welldoing, a thing which thou (in reason), not I, ought to exact and require of thyself; yet I (as I were thy guardian or overseer, & thy father Abraham dying had bequeathed thee wholly to my trust) follow thee, haunt thee by my Spirit, daily and hourly importune thee to remember and gather thyself. How often have I (to this effect) chidingly communed with thy soul and conscience? Sinful Jerusalem, why defer’st thou to gather thyself, & agree with my voice in the way? Yet thou may’st agree; yet thy way is not finished; yet thy adversary walks by thee. Why dost thou prorogue till thy wretched life be at his way’s end? Is there any other life, any other way (when this way of woe is ended) wherein thou may’st agree with thine adversary? The judge, the sergeant, the prison thou must then await, and despair of opportunity ever after to agree or be gathered to grace, but look to be gathered like grass on the house-top, and thrown into the fire. Promise not unto thyself too many years’ travelling in the way; think not thou shalt ever live; thy way may be cut off ere thou be aware; a thousand casualties may cut thee off in the way. But how long or how short soe’er thy way be, my voice (thine adversary) like thy shadow still haunteth thee, still
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treadeth on thy heels, still calls and cries out upon thee to gather up thy accounts and agree with it. Sham’st thou not (vild image of carelessness) so long to be called on for so light a matter, so long to live at variance with so mighty an adversary? It is all one as if thou shouldst owe an earthly judge money (who hath the law in his hand), and brave him and deny to come to composition, saying, If I owe it you, gather it or recover it as you can. How thinkest thou, is there any earthly judge would spare thee or forbear thee as I have done? My voice, as it is my voice, is thy friend, but as thou abusest it (turns thine ears from it, and wilt not agree with it), it is thine adversary; it wisheth thee well, and thou wishest thyself ill; it bids thee crouch and stoop to the prophets I send, and thou stonest them; it bids thee pity the widow and the fatherless, & thou oppressest them; it bids thee repent thee of the evil thou hast committed, and thou doublest it; it bids thee gather and gird up thy loins close, and take the staff of steadfastness in thy hand, that if the flesh and the devil assault thee in the way, thou may’st encounter them courageously. Instead of girding and gathering up thy loins, thou unloosest them to all licentiousness; for the staff of steadfastness, thou armest thyself with the broken reed of inconstancy, and for encountering and contending with the flesh and the devil, most slavishly thou kissest and embracest them. So thou thyself (I altogether loath) makest my voice thy enemy. No friend so firm but by oft ill usage may be made a foe. No marvel thou makest me thy foe, that art a foe to thyself. He that loveth iniquity hateth his own soul; he that hateth his own soul can never love his neighbour, insomuch as there is no man living that can love another better than himself. If then his best love to himself be to hate himself, his love to his neighbour must be a degree lower, there is no remedy. The law commandeth, Love thy neighbour as thyself, and he fulfilleth the law by hating his neighbour as himself. I say unto you, he that hateth his neighbour is guilty of the breach of all the commandments, whence it necessarily ariseth that he which loves not his own soul is guilty of the breach of all the commandments. Soul-hating apostata Jerusalem, that wouldest never be gathered into any compass of good life, I here accuse thee as a homicide of thine own life, as a transgressor of all the commandments, in hating thyself. The most unfortunatest is my fortune of any that ever loved, to love those that not only hate me, but hate themselves. O Jerusalem, not the infidel Romans which shall invade thee, and make thy city (now cleped a city of peace) a shambles of dead bodies, tear down thy temple, and set up a brothel-house in thy sanctuary, not they (I say) shall have one drop of thy blood laid to their charge, not one stone of thy temple or sanctuary testificatory against them; thy blood shall be upon thine own head, whose transgressions violently thrust swords into their hands. Thy temple and thy sanctuary shall both cry out against thy security for sacrilege. The ark wherein the tables of covenant are laid shall have the tables taken away, and instead of them a black register of thy misdemeanours laid in it; yea, my father (if all witnesses should fail) would stand up and article against thee himself, how thou hast driven him (with thy detestable whoredoms) out of his consecrated dwelling-place. O, that thou knewest the time of thy visitation! O, that thou wouldest have had care of thyself, had care of me! I must be slaughtered for thee, & yet work no salvation for thee.
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One cross alone (cruel Jerusalem) is not able to sustain the weight of thine iniquities; ten times I must be crucified ere thou be cleansed. For sin I came to suffer; thy sin exceedeth my suffering; it is too monstrous a matter for my mercy or merits to work on. It woundeth me more with meditating on it than all the spears or nails can wound me that are to pass through me. I would quite renounce and forswear mine own safety, so I might but extort from thee one thought of thine own safety. Careful am I for thee careless. Again this reneweth my unrest that I, which am the lord and author of life, must be the author and evidencer against thee of death. If thou hadst never seen the light, thy walking in darkness would have brought thee no wailment. Ignorantia, si non excusat a toto, saltem excusat a tanto, Ignorance excuseth the half, if not the whole. Thou hast not half an excuse (hence is my tears), not a quarter, not the hundredth part of a quarter, not a word, not a sigh, not a syllable. Never did I look on such a manifest unmasked leprous face, on a prisoner convicted so mute. Sore am I impassioned for the storm thy tranquillity is in child with. Good Jeremy, now I desire with thee that I had a cottage of wayfaring men in the wilderness, where I might leave my people and live, for they be all adulterers and a band of rebels. A tormentor (that abjureth commiseration when he first enters into the infancy of his occupation) would collachrymate my case, and rather choose to have been tortured himself than torment me with ingratitude as thou dost. More and more thou addest to my unease, and acquain’st mine eyes with the infirmities of anguish; having no sin before, thou hast almost made me commit sin in sorrowing for thy sins. Yet though I have sounded the utmost depth of dolour, and wasted mine eye-balls well-near to pins’-heads with weeping (as a barber wasteth his ball in the water), a further depth of dolour would I sound, mine eyes more would I waste, so I might waste and wash away thy wickedness. So long have I wasted, so long have I washed and embained thy filth in the clear streams of my brain, that now I have not a clean tear left more, to wash or embalm [sic?] any sinner that comes to me. The fount of my tears (troubled and mudded with the toad-like stirring and long-breathed vexation of thy venomous enormities) is no longer a pure silver spring, but a miry puddle for swine to wallow in. Black and cindery (like smiths’-water) are those excrements that source down my cheeks, and far more sluttish than the ugly ooze of the channel. ‘Tis thou alone (ulcerous Jerusalem) that hast so fouled and soiled them. In seeking to gather fruits of thee, I gather nothing but staining berries, which imbrued my hands and almost poisoned my heart. Never would I mention this, or moan me, if thou hadst not imbrued or brawned thine own hands (not in berries) but in blood, and more than (almost) poisoned thine own heart. What talk I of poison, when it is become as familiar to thee as meat & drink? Thou hast used it so long for meat and drink, that true nourishing meat and drink thou now takest for poison. Consuetudo est altera natura, Custom hath so engrafted it in thy nature that now, not only poison not hurts thee, but fostereth and cherisheth thee. Whatsoever thou art is poison, and none thou breathest on but thou poisonest. With Athenagoras of Argos, thou never feelest any pain when thou art stung with a scorpion; thou hast no sting or
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remorse of conscience. Thy soul is cast in a dead sleep, and may not be awaked though heaven & earth should tumble together. For discharge of my duty, and augmentation of thine everlasting malediction, since tears, threats, promises, nor anything will pierce thee, here I make a solemn protestation what my zeal and fervent inclination hath been (ever since thy first propagation) to win & wean thee from Satan, and notwithstanding thou stoned’st my prophets, and slew’st them I sent unto thee, I still assayed to revoke thee, & bring thee back again to thy first image; not once, or twice, or thrice, but I cannot tell how often, I would have gathered thee, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but thou wouldest not. Blame me not though I give thee over, that hast given me over; long patience hath dulled my humour of pity. No sword but will lose his edge in long striking against stones. My lean withered hands (consisting of naught but bones) are all-to-shivered and splintered in their wide cases of skin, with often beating on the anvil of my bared breast. So penetrating and elevatedly have I prayed for you, that mine eyes would fain have broken from their anchors to have flown up to heaven, and mine arms stretched more than the length of my body to reach at the stars. My heart ran full-butt against my breast to have broken it open, and my soul fluttered and beat with her airy wings on every side for passage. My knees cracked, and the ground fled back. Then (O Jerusalem) would I have rent my body in the midst (like a grave) so I might have buried thy sins in my bowels. And had I been in heaven as I was on earth, the sun should have exhaled from thee all thy trespasses as meteors, which the clouds, his cofferers, receiving, might forthwith have conduited down into the sea, and drowned forever. Fools be they that imagine it is the winds that so toss and turmoil them in the deep; they are no winds but insurrective sins which so possess the waves with the spirit of raging. I drowned all the sins of the first world in water; all the sins of the first world now welter, souse, & beat unquietly in the sea, whither the world of waters was withdrawn when the deluge was ended, and as a guilty conscience can nowhere take rest, so no more can they in the sea, but, embolning the billows up to the air, with roaring and howling dart themselves on every rock, desiring it to overwhelm them, and because they know they can never be recovered, with the same envy which is in the devils they seek to drown and ramverse every ship that they meet. If happily there be a calm, it is when they are weary of excruciating themselves. I, that was born to suppress & tread down sin under foot, in the night-time (when that sin-inhabited element is wont to be most lunatic) walk on the crests of the surges as on the dry land. Another cause why the sea so swelleth & barketh of late more than ordinary is for when I sent the devils into the herd of swine, they carried them headlong into the sea where they drowned and perished them, and then, loath to come to land to be controlled and dispossessed again by me, they entered and inhabited the sea-monsters, such as the whale, the grampus, the wasserman, whom they have suborned and inspired to lie in wait for shipwrecks. Sin takes no rest but on earth, and on earth no rest in the night, but the day. The night is black like the devil; then he may boldly walk abroad like the owl, and his eyes ne’er be dazzled. Solus cum solo he may confer with his subjects, tempt, terrify,
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insinuate what he will. He knows that God hath therefore hid all other objects from man’s sight in the night, that then he should have no occasion to gaze elsewhere, but full leisure to look into himself. In which regard, lest he should look into himself and so repent, he will not let him see with his own eyes, but lendeth him other eyes of despair or security to see withal. If of security, then either he persuades him there is no God, and that religion is but subtle lawgivers’ policy (to keep silly fools in awe with scarecrows), or that if there be a God, he is a wise God, and like a wise counsellor troubles not himself with every vain twittle-twattle of this man or that man, but considers whereof we are made, and bears with us thereafter. Yea (which is horrible), he sootheth him up, that if God would not have had him sin, he would never have given him the parts or the means to sin with. If he be a whoremaster, he remembreth him how Abraham went in to his maid Hagar, how Lot committed incest with his daughters, how David lay with Berseba and slew Urias, and how I (myself) would not let the woman that had committed adultery be stoned to death, but bid her go home to her house in peace, & sin no more. If he be a drunkard, Noah was drunk, the forenamed Lot was drunk, and David (mentioned before likewise) made Urias drunk, yet all these were men that God delighted in. If he be a perjured person, why, Peter forswore himself thrice, Joseph swore by the life of Pharaoh, David swore, God do so and so to me if I leave to Nabal yet ere night one to piss against the walls. Yet when Nabal’s wife Abigail (unwitting to her husband) brought him a little refreshing, his humour was pacified, his oath was dispensed with. A great many more allegations hath he to this end, which here to recite were to weapon presumption, and save the devil a labour in seducing. Murder, theft, (what not?) hath his texts to authorize him. Nothing doth profit but perverted may hurt; scripture, as it may be literally expounded and sophistically scanned, may play the harbinger as well for hell as heaven, and sooner feeds despair than faith. Hath not the devil his chapel close adjoining to God’s church? Is he not the ambitious ape of God’s majesty? And as he hath his tabernacle (O Jerusalem) in thy temple, so hath not he his oracle or tripos in his temple at Delphos, with as great (if not greater) sacrifices, oblations & offerings than are in God’s temple? Will he not take upon him to work miracles, cure diseases & be an angel of light, that is, preach the gospel as I do? Speak I in thunder or visions, he speaketh in thunder and visions. Eclipse I the sun and moon, he will eclipse sun, moon and stars. Send I one good angel out, he will send out two ill. In conclusion, in anything he will imitate me but humility, and by humility only, my children are known from the devil’s. Pride is that by which the devil holds his kingdom; he had ne’er been a devil if he had not been too proud to be an angel. Envy breeds pride, and pride breeds envy; there is none can uphold envy but he must uphold pride, nor can true pride live if it hath nothing to envy at; if it have nothing so great as itself to aim at, there is no man under it hath any pride or prosperity but it envies and aims at. The sun, though it can endure no more suns but itself, yet it can take in good part to have more planets besides itself, but pride can endure no superiors, no equals, no ascendants, no sprigs, no grafts, no likely beginnings. Anything but virtue it can tolerate to thrive, and that it is too too afraid of. Mark a tyrant when you will, and he first extirpates the
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adherents to virtue. Virtue is thrice more invocating for honour than ambition. What was the devil’s first practice in paradise but to destroy virtue in Adam, and so by steps to destroy him by destroying virtue in him? Whom slew Cain but his just or virtuous brother Abel? He was afraid the comparison of his justness or virtue would make him incomparably ugly in God’s presence. Whom hated Esau, and laid wait for, but his upright brother Jacob, because by his virtue he had overreached him in the blessing of his birthright? Did not Saul persecute David only because God loved him? So throughout the whole course of the scriptures, virtue purchaseth envy, and her possessors never escape briery scratches. But as before, so once more I will assertionate, virtue hath no enemy but pride. I myself have no enemy but pride, which is the summum genus of sin, & may well be a convertible name with the devil, for the devil is naught but pride, and pride is an absolute devil. But for pride, Jerusalem ere this had gathered itself under my wing. Forsooth, she disdained to be taught & instructed by such a mean-titled man as I. But for pride of despising the preaching of Noah, the first world had not been deluged. But for pride, there had been no translation of monarchies. If Pharaoh had not been so proud that he would not let your forefathers go (but kept them in despite of me), I had never plagued him as I did. The reason I deceived you, Hierosolemites & Jews (in not coming in pride unto you, in not taking the majesty and triumph of mine eternity) was because I would not partake with the devil in the pomp and glory of this world, which is proper to him. Did not he (presently after the first bruit of my gospel) hoise me up unto an exceeding high mountain, and showed me all the kingdoms of the world, & the glories of them, and said, All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me? When I came to Abraham in his tent, and to Lot in Sodom, accompanied with another angel, I took upon me no pompous shape. It is debasement and a punishment to me to invest and enrobe myself in the dregs and dross of mortality. I would resemble the similitude of the meanest, to gather the meanest unto me. I came to call sinners to repentance, poor sinners, beggarly sinners, blind sinners, impotent sinners, as well as rich sinners, noble sinners, potentate sinners to repentance. With me there is no respect of persons; the king’s blood, attainted of conspiracy against me, is more base than the caitiff’s or peasant’s. What was Abraham (but that he honoured me) I should out of his loins multiply monarchy? There is no cripple or lazar by the highway side but would have honoured me more than the progeny of Abraham, if I had but bestowed the thousand part of the propitiousness I have bestowed on the progeny of Abraham. Shall a man call any cripple or beadsman unto him to give alms to, and he will not come at him, but contemptuously cast his kind proffer behind him? I have called you (that often have been beggars and beadsmen unto me) for blessings, & humbly supplicationed you to accept of my largess I lavished, but you cried, Avaunt, hypocrite, thy proffered ware is odious; we’ll have nothing to do with an innovator. What hath immortality to do with muck? Had my father no employment for me but to send me to scrape on a dunghill for pearl, where nothing will thrive but toadstools? Was thought-exceeding glorification such a cloyance and cumber unto me that I must leave it,
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as Archesilaus, over-melodied and too much mellowed & sugared with sweet tunes, turned them aside, and caused his ears to be new relished with harsh, sour and unsavoury sounds? O no, when I left heaven to live on earth, I left perpetual-springing summer to sleep on beds of ice in the frozen zone, the throne of winter. My superabundant love to men on earth was all the solace I proposed to myself on earth. Vbi cuiusque animus est, ibi animat, Where a man’s mind is, there his mirth is.
Herodot.
Mirth was to me no mirth whiles thou wert not gathered unto me. No more than I have gathered thee can I gather thee; as a hen gathereth her chickens, so would I have gathered thy children. The hen clocketh her chickens; I would have clocked and called them by my preaching. The hen shieldeth them, and fighteth for them against the puttock; I would have shielded them, and secured them against that sly puttock Satan. I would have fought for them with hell, the devil and all infernality. The hen, after she hath clocked & called her chickens, keepeth them warm under her soft down, walleth them in with her wings, and watcheth for them whiles they sleep. After I had called you (my children or chickens) under my wings, which is, into my church, I would have been a stronger wall unto you than the wall of the tower of Babel which (as writers affirm) was the eighth part of a mile thick; I would have set an angel (with a fiery sword) in your gate to keep out your enemies; still would I (with the heat & warmth of my spirit) have cherished and increased the strength & growth of your faith, and kept it from being dead and cold; my vigilance should have sentinelled for all your sleeps; neither the terror by night nor the arrow of temptation that flieth by day should have frighted you. Satan (whom you now hold for such a subtle underminer) should have been your fool and your jesting-stock, and a scare-bug to your babes only. All things should have prospered and gone well that you had taken in hand. Happy is the man that sitteth in the shadow of the wings of the Almighty: unhappy are you, that have rather sought to dwell in the shadow of death than under the shadow of the wings of the Almighty. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest my prophets, & stonest them I sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but you would not! What is more tender than a hen over her chickens? So tender and more (O Jerusalem) have I been over thy children, yet would they never tender themselves, but tend and bend all their courses to ruin. Never could I get them to flock under my wing, or come under my roof. Who takes charge of him that in a time of war will not come into the town, but lie wilfully without the walls? No charge do I take of any that will not come within my walls, be gathered under my wing, but live out of the church. Knew you what a fearful thing it were to live (as outlaws) from the wings of my church, to let riches, promotion or any worldly respects hinder you from being gathered into the unity of my body and communion of saints, you would undoubtedly forsake all, and follow me. All those that repaired not in time into Noah’s ark, the waters overtook and drowned. Those that gathered not manna in the morning, it did them no good. Those that made excuses, and came not to the wedding when they were bidden, the king sent forth his warriors and destroyed them, and burnt up their cities. Senseless stones are more obedient unto God’s voice than you, for the stony walls of Jericho (after God had
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summoned them by his priests sounding their trumpets seven times) at the 7. sound they prostrated themselves flat. Not the third, or the fourth, or the fifth sound have you withstood, but five hundred solemn summons and sounds; no judgement that (in your ears) I or any can sound can make you fall prostrate, or humble yourselves. Still you will live as runagates and banished men from God’s jurisdiction; you had rather the devil should gather you up than he. I have piped, and you have not danced; I have lamented and you have not mourned: the days will come when I shall be taken away from you, and then you shall wish (in vain) that you had danced after my pipe, and borne a principal part in my consort of mourning. Let all successions and cities be warned by you how they neglect God’s calling; let every private man be admonished by you how he neglecteth God’s calling. By benefits, by sickness, by outward crosses, signs and wonders he calleth men: Today if you will hear my voice, harden not your hearts, that is, at this present when I call you, hearken to me. Who doth not hearken at the first, let him look to be hardened. Pharaoh, for he would not at the first voice or message let the children of Israel go, his heart was hardened. God, when his voice will not be heard, permitteth the devil to go and try if his voice will be heard; if they hear the devil’s and not his, then hath he wherewithal to convince them. Jerusalem hath heard the voice of God crying out loud in her streets and high places unto her to gather herself; her streets and all her high places are filled with the echoes of God’s voice. The stones of her turrets have been so moved with it that they have opened their ears & received his echo into them, and that the crier might know they attended the words which he spake, they (echoing) repeated them again. The very echo of the walls and the stones shall echo unto God for sharp punishment against you, and let any but read or rehearse this sentence, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem how often would I have gathered thy children together, as the hen gathereth her chickens, the echo shall reply, But they would not. They would not. Thou wouldest not indeed. And no damnation hast thou but thou wouldst not. I offered thee peace, but thou wouldst not; I offered thee to repent & be baptized, but thou wouldst not; I offered thee (if thou laboured’st and wert loaden) to ease thee, but thou wouldst not; I offered thee to ask & thou shouldst have, but thou wouldst not; to knock and it should be opened, but thou wouldst not. Great evils shalt thou endure, for thou wouldst not. Great evils, did I say? Alas, little evils, compared to the evils I must endure only for these 4 words, But thou wouldst not. Heu melior quanto sors tua sorte mea est. My body shall find a sepulchre, but my sorrow never any, for thou wouldst not. Forever I must mourn what thou forever must suffer, for thou wouldst not. This will be thine utter impeachment, that the very Samaritans (whom thou accountest infidels) received and acknowledged me, but thou wouldst not; that the unclean spirits departing out of men cried and confessed me to be the son of God, but thou wouldst not; and lastly, that the spirit of God himself (descending on my head like a dove) gave testimony of me, yet thou wouldst not. Gene. 19.
Clamor Sodomorum multiplicatus est, the cry of thee, Jerusalem (the second Sodom) that thou wouldst not, in God’s ears is doubled. To what nation shall I now preach or appeal, since my elected people (that should hearken to me) have answered me they would not?
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Psalm 65.
Ninevah repented the preaching of Jonas, but Jerusalem at the preaching of her Jesus, she would not. I offered to wash her feet with the waters of my tribulation, and heal every disease and malady she had with them, as I healed the leprosy of Naaman with the waters of Jordan, but over the waters of my tears and tribulation she passeth as dry-foot as once they passed over Jordan. The river of God is full of water; Jerusalem, were thine eyes the rivers of God, they would be full of water. The snow on thy mountains by the sun is resolved to water; the son of God hath sought to resolve thy snow-cold heart into water, but he could not, for thou wouldst not. Over the principal gates and the doors of thy temple let therefore this for an empress be engraven: A kind compassionate man who, grieving to see a serpentine salamander fry in the fire (so piteously as it seemed), cast water on the raging flames to quench them, and was by him stung to death for his labour. The mot or word thereto, AT NOLVISTI, But thou wouldst not. As who should say, thank thyself though thou still burnest; I would have rid thee out of the fire, but thou wouldst not. By stinging me (mortally) thou disturbest me. On thee, salamander-like Jerusalem, have I cast the cool water of my tears, to keep hellfire (if it might be) from feeding on thee and enwrapping thee, but thou (delighting like that chilly worm to live in the midst of the furnace, or, as the foolish candle-fly, to blow the fire with the beating of thy wings near unto it that must burn thee), hath spit thy poison at me when I sought to preserve thee. More agreeing is it to thy nature to fry in the flames of thy fleshly desires (which is but a short-blazed straw-fire, to tind or enkindle hell-fire) than to live temperately qualified midst insulae fortunatae, the fortunate islands of God’s favour. For this shalt thou be consumed with fire, Thy house shall be left desolate unto thee. Hitherto, with Ieschaciabus, thou hast had naught but a plaster of dry figs laid to thy boil; thou hast been chastised but with wanton whips, but lo, shortly (the time comes) thou must be scourged with scorpions; a hook shall be cast into thy jaws, and a chain come through thy nostrils. I now but foretell a storm in a calm, but when the leviathan shall approach (that with his neezings chaseth clouds), and you shall see lighting and thunder in the mouths of all the four winds, when heaven (instead of stars) shall be made an artillery-house of hailstones, and no planet revolve anything but prostitution and vastity, then shall you know what it is by saying you would not, to make your house unto you be left desolate. With the foolish builder, you have founded your palaces on the sands of your own shallow conceits; had you rested them on the true rock, they had been ruin-proof, but now the rain will rough-enter through the crannies of their wavering; the winds will blow and batter ope wide passages for the pashing showers; with roaring and buffeting lullabies, instead of singing and dandling by-os, they will rock them clean over and over. The only commodity they shall tithe to their owners will be (by their overturning) to afford them tombs unasked. Great shall be the fall of thy foolish building (O Jerusalem); like a tower overtopped, it shall fall flat, and be laid low and desolate. In the haven of Joppa shall arrive as many ships as would make a marine city, in bigness no less than thyself. The Hellespont by Xerxes was never so surcharged as it shall be.
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All Galilee (from the land of Nepthali upwards), shall be but a quarter for their pioneers, and a couch for their baggage. From Jerusalem to the plain of Gibeon (which is fifty miles’ distance) the infinite enemy will depopulate, and pitch his pavilions. Man, woman, child he shall unmortalize & mangle, oxen, sheep, camels idly engore and leave to putrefy in the open fields, only to raise up seed to snakes, adders and serpents. The Mount Tabor (whose height is thirty furlongs, and on whose top is a plain twenty-three furlongs broad) shall have all the star-gazing towns (on it situate) justled headlong down from the height of his forehead, and breaking their backs with their stumbling rebutment, tumble in the air like Lucifer falling out of heaven into hell. Yea, their firmamentpropping foundation shall be adequated with the Valley of Jehosaphat, whose sublimity, whiles it is in beheading, the sky shall resign all his clouds to the earth, and light-winged dust dignify itself in the name of a meteor. From that blind-dispersed night of dust shall many lesser mountains receive their lofty mounting, and part of it (being wind-wafted into the sea) insert floating islands midst the ocean.
Dan. 12.
None shall there be left to fight the battles of the Lord but those that fight the battles of their own ambition. By none shall the sanctuary be defended but those that would have none destitute it or deflower it but themselves. The Feast of Tabernacles, the feast of sweet bread, and the Feast of Weeks shall quite be discalendared. Your Sabbaths and new moons shall want a remembrancer; your peace-offerings and continual sacrifice (a thousand, two hundred and ninety days, as Daniel prophesied) shall be put to silence. The abomination of desolation shall advance itself in your sanctum sanctorum. Upon your altars (instead of oblations) your priests shall be slaughtered. Not so much as the high priest (the under-god of your city) but shall be hanged up (as a sign) at the door of your temple. The particularity of your general forespoken woes would work in me a tympany of tears if I should portraiture it. I have pronounced it, and your house (unreprievable) unto you shall be left desolate. The resplendent eye-outbraving buildings of your temple (like a drum) shall be ungirt & unbraced; the soul of it, which is the (forenamed) sanctum sanctorum, clean shall be stripped and unclothed. God shall have ne’er a tabernacle or retiring place in your city which he shall not be undermined and desolated out of. The sun & moon (perplexed with the spectacle) shall fly farther upward into heaven, and be afraid lest (when the besiegers have ended below) they next sack them out of their sieges or circuits, since they have had God (their common creator) so long in chase. Jerusalem, ever after thy bloody hecatomb or burial, the sun (rising & setting) shall enrobe himself in scarlet, and the maiden moon (in the ascension of her perfection) shall have her crimson cheeks (as they would burst) round balled out with blood. Those ruddy investurings and scarlet habiliments from the cloud-climbing slaughter-stack of thy dead carcasses shall they exhalingly quintessence, to the end thou may’st not only be culpable of gorging the earth, but of goring the heavens with blood, and in witness against thee, wear them they shall to the world’s end as the liveries of thy waning. Not Abraham’s sons are you, but the sons of blood, for in nothing you imitate Abraham but that he (having no more save one only son) would have sacrificed him; so God,
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having no more but one only son, you lie in wait to crucify and sacrifice him. For thine own destruction (disgraded daughter of Sion) thou liest in wait, in laying wait for me; that which I hunger & thirst after is thy salvation in my destruction. I am enamoured of my cross because it is all ages’ blessing. Not a nail in it but is a necessary agent in the world’s redemption. Holy cross, Adam’s offspring, only holiness, I grieve that upon thee I can spend none of my godhead as well as my humanity, to glorify the more this great exploit. For the desolating and disinheriting of hell have I that reserved; none but the God of heaven may lead captivity captive, & return conqueror from that dungeonly kingdom. Strange is it (O Jerusalem) that I should be able to conquer and forage hell, and yet cannot conquer or bring under thee to mine obedience. To speak troth (as in my lips is no guile), thou art not worthy to be conquered, or have the host of thine affections subdued by me, that hast admitted of a baser conqueror, which is the devil, after whom I can succeed with no honour. The Romans (not I) shall conquer thee, and leave thy house desolate unto thee, who being heathens, and not knowing God, are a degree of indignity inferior to the devil, for he knows God, and with fear & trembling acknowledgeth him. Wouldst thou with fear & trembling have fled to me for refuge against the devil and the Romans when I would have gathered thee, both the devil and the Romans (at one instant) had been subdued to thine hand. But under my standard thou wouldest not, thou scorned’st to gather thee, therefore shall thy house be left desolate unto thee, therefore shall God’s house be left desolate unto thee. Majestical temple, on which pinnacle once I was tempted, thou and I (one after another) must perish, for no fault of our own, but for the sins of this people. No profit, but disprofit, shall the scattered ashes of thy obsequies bring unto them, nor shall they, like the ashes of me, the true phoenix, live again; never shall thy body (like mine) be raised again. Raced and defaced shalt thou be as thou hadst never been. Haply caves for wild beasts (many years together) thou may’st afford, but the Lord of Hosts shall abandon thee, the King of Israel shall abjure thee. By Herod (a man of blood) thou wert last builded, and in blood shalt thou be buried. O, let me embrace thee while thou yet standest, and I am not translated; hereafter (perhaps) ne’er may I have the opportunity to embrace thee. This present hour that is granted, I will put out to usury. On thy alabaster outside, with scalding sighs & dimming kisses, a greater dew I will raise than lies upon sweaty marble a little before rain. Methinks these stones look shining and smiling upon me; Jerusalem frowns like a shebear seeking her whelps. These stones start not out of their assigned places, but still retain their imposed first proportion; from me (the foundation) long ago hath Jerusalem started; out of those limits and bounds I assigned her hath she started, her order she hath broken, my building she hath subverted, no form or face of my workmanship is visible in her. But yet, were nothing but her face and outside deformed, it were somewhat; her inside is worst of all; her heart, her lungs, her liver & her gall all are carrionized and contaminated with surfeits of self-will. Her own heart she eateth, and digesteth into the draught with riot and excess.
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Poor temple, long might’st thou stand, & not have a stone of thee disquieted till the judgement-day, if those to whom thou belongest were not ten times branded in the forehead for reprobates, not with the mark of the lamb, but the lion, who (roaring) seeketh whom he may devour. Distressfully am I divided from thee; my soul (when it shall be divided from me) will not endrench me in so much dolour as thou dost. The zeal of thee distraughteth me, and some essential part of my life seemeth to forsake me and drop from me when I think of thy devastation. Nothing so much doth macerate and mad me as that all the sky-perfuming prayers & profuse sacrificatory expenses of full-hand oblationers should not have force to uphold thee. Desolation, for no debt of sin shalt thou extend on this temple; that thou hast to extend against it, extend against me, for it is my father’s habitation. It will but augment his indignation against this city, and do thee no good, to drive him out of house and home, and reserve him no sanctified mansion upon earth. Let there be one peculiar treasury of supplications & vows undestroyed and unpillaged. O father, be this house more high-prized to thee than paradise; more worship and adoration hast thou had in it than in paradise. There thou set’st a fiery-armed guardant to repulse insolent invaders; set some garrisonment before the gate of thy tabernacle, to oppugn the dispossessors of thy deity. Thou canst not hear me; I pray for them whose sins sue against me. Thou hast decreed (in thy secret judgement) their house shall be left desolate unto them, thou hast decreed I shall be left desolate on the cross, and cry, Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabachthani, unaided or unregarded. Willing am I to execute thy will; only let me not in vain give up the ghost, but some souls of this panther-spotted Jerusalem may be extraught to joy with me. O, that mine arms were wide enough to engrasp the walls of Jerusalem about, that in mine amorous enfoldment (unawares) I might whirl her to heaven with me! Why should I not drive all Israel before me to the great felicity, as a shepherd before him driveth his flock to the fat pastures? I shall never drive you before me; you will drive me before you (with murder & violence) to immortality, and yourselves not one foot follow after. Pol me occidistis amici, You whom I thought to bind to me as friends, have foe-like betrayed me. Because I am humble, I may not please you. Because I am Christ the just, therefore you will design me to the cross unjustly. Est mihi supplicij causa fuisse pium. Would God there were no other exclamatory crime than this to be objected against thee. Yet have I suffered of thee nothing but fear. More than fear am I (within these few days) to entertain at thy hands. Slay me thou shalt, because I have vouchsafed to live with thee, and doom me an unworthy end in lieu of my dear love. Tu mihi criminis author, no imputation of scandal shall I have but the heavy burden of thy abuses. Thou shalt be my uninnocence and whole sum of delinquishment; thy right hand of my death shall be arraigned. Hoc prohibete nefas, scelerique resistite vestro. Not the profane idolatry of the gentiles in my sides shall delve so deep as thy stiff-necked transgressions. Less do I deplore my death than thy life, and a thousand times have I wished and desired that thou hadst only occasion to repent my death, and not thine own other misdeeds. Repent yet, & I will
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Ezek. 3. Esay 5.
repent me of the pronouncement against thee. Should I not so have pronounced and denunciated against thee, thy blood would have been required at my hands. Therefore is my people led captive (saith the Lord to Esay), because they know me not. Your pretence of unknowledge or ignorance is already counterpleaded; you shall not say, Woe be to me that I never tasted the milk of understanding, but (with Job) ban the time that ever you sucked the breasts. At my breasts, Jerusalem, hast thou not sucked, but bit off my breasts when thou stoned’st my prophets. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem that stonest my prophets, and killest them I sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but thou wouldst not! Therefore shall thy house be left desolate unto thee. Here ebb the spring-tide of my tears; eyes, from this present, prepare yourselves to be recluses. I came not to shed tears, but blood, for Jerusalem; blood for Jerusalem will I shed, to atone for her shedding of innocent blood, so that let her yet turn unto me, her atonement is made. I will corroborate my cross giantlike, to underbear the Atlas burden of her insolences. With my Nazarite tresses, to my cross will I bind her crossing frowardness and contaminations. Not a nail that takes hold of me, but I will (expressly) enjoin it to take hold of her deflectings and errors. Death (as ever thou hopest at my hands to have thy commission enlarged), when thou killest me, kill her iniquities also; let thy deep-entering dart oblivionize their memories. Of man (as of me) thou killest but the body only; kill the body & the soul both, of her unbounded sin-gluttony. I will pay thee largely for thy pains. Whereas before thou never took’st any but the subjects prisoners, now thou shalt have the king himself surrendered to thy cruelty. Thou shalt enrich thy style with this title, I, Emperor Death, the Lord of all Flesh, the Killer of the King of all Kings, etc. Deal well by Jerusalem, however thou dealest with me. Let not her soul be left desolate, though her city be left desolate unto her. Even the high priests that shall bind mine hands and adjudge my body to be scourged, deal mercifully with; cut them not off suddenly, but give them a space of repentance. Let them be crowned with eternity, though they crown me with thorns. Their crowning me with thorns I take for no trespass, for they cannot prick me so ill with those briers as they have provoked me with their sin. Nor shall the gall and vinegar they give me to drink be so bitter unto me as their blasphemies. Forgive them, Lord; they forget what they do. Further I may not proceed, except I should detract from my passion to add to my tears. He that can weep with more soul-martyrdom than I, let him take upon him to wash (in my stead) the earth’s Ethiopian face. Every vein of me let it burst, to feed the Lake of Gehenna, before Gehenna gather springs from the heart of Jerusalem. Not the least hair of my body but may it be as a peg in a vessel, to broach blood with plucking out, so in the droppings of that blood Jerusalem will bathe herself. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that stonest my prophets, and killest them I sent unto thee, ten thousand times adieu. I would never have bid thee adieu, or been divorced from thee, but that thou thyself hast divorced thyself. Heaven no heaven hast thou made unto me, by endless performing thy obits. If
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my crimson tears on the cross may more prevail with thee, so it is, or else in vain I descended, or else to thy pain I descended. Descend into the closet of thine own conscience, and enquire how oft I have come thither and called upon thee to gather thee. Examine thy heart & thy reins if I have not secretly communed with thee by night, to convert & be turned unto me. Thou never withdrew’st thyself and wert solitary, but my spirit was reproving and disputing with thee. At length shall I obtain of thee to remember and gather thyself? Though thou wilt not in respect of me (whom thou shouldest respect), yet in respect of thine own benefit remember and gather thyself, enter into meditation of thy lamentable estate. But hear thy physician, though thou intendest not to be ruled by him. Understand the nature of thy disease, which is the first step to recovery. Relieve my languor by being less reckless of thy invisible aspiring infirmity. Glance but half a kind look at me, though thou canst not resolve to love me; by half a look my love may steal into thine eyes unlooked for. Thy sight is no way mis-spent or impaired by casting away one askance regard on any. The sun shineth as well on the good as the bad; God from on high beholdeth all the works of iniquity as well as the upright of heart. It behooveth thee to try all spirits; let my spirit be one of those (all) which thou bringest to the touchstone. I do not will thee without trial, on my bare report, to be directed by it, but when thou hast tried it & sifted it to the uttermost, then as it approves itself, to entertain it. Upon uncertain experiments (having the least pretence of gain in them) men will hazard and venture many thousands; try once an experiment to gain heaven with; venture or hazard but a few indifferent good thoughts of me. I say I am thy Messiah, and am come to gather thee; condemn me not rashly, but await and see the end of my gathering, whereto it sorts. Search the scriptures and the prophets, whether I be a liar and impostor or no. I would give thee leave to hate me, so thy hate would make thee industrious & sedulous to hearken out & enquire whence I am. Were I notorious guilty, and unexamined & unheard you should sentence me, you should give to me amongst men an opinion of innocence; being not guilty, you make your judgements guilty of knowing I am not guilty, in proceeding against me without circumstance or proof. I speak all this while to the wind, or as a disconsolate prisoner that complaineth himself to the stone walls. God is moved and mollified (though he be never so incensed) with often and unslacked intercessions; gold (which is the sovereign of metals) bends soonest; only iron (the peasant of all) is most inflexible. Jerusalem with nothing is moved, therefore must her tabernacle be removed, therefore must her house be left desolate unto her. Often, importunately, violently, eagerly have I intercessioned unto her to gather herself unto me; I have kneeled, wept bitterly, lift up mind hands, hung upon her and vowed never to let her go till she consented to retire herself into my tuition, & answered pleasingly to my petition. Never did the widow in my parable so follow and tire the wicked judge with fury-haunting instancy, as I have done her. Nowhere could she rest but I have alarumed in her ears her pride, murder and hypocrisy, and with dismal crying and vociferative inculcating unto her, drawn my throat so high into the roof of my mouth that it hath quite swallowed up & ensheathed my tongue, and threatened to turn my mouth out of his office.
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I have cracked my eye-strings with excessive staring and steadfast heaven-gazing, when with fast-fortified prayer and ear-agonizing invocation I have distressed my father’s soul for her, so that (enraged) he hath bid me out of his sight, chid me, rebuked me, and impatiently said, as he said unto Moses, Let me alone, that I may wreak mine anger on her and consume her. None of these may overcome her; the blood of my prophets and the hundred-voiced clamour of her multiplied mutinies gainst heaven are far louder before my father than I; they out-throat me, and put me down I cannot be heard, even as one that howls puts down him that sings. Me would not Jerusalem hear, when with sweet songs I have allured, clucked & wooed her to come under my wings; therefore will not my father hear any man that once names her. When I pray for her, her sins fall ahowling, that I should not be heard. My wings her grey-headed sturdy disobedience hath now clean unpinioned and broken, so that (though I would) I cannot gather her. Besides, she hath steeled my soft impressive heart, and myrmidonized mine eyes, that they shall never give grief a tear more alms. Poor hens, there is nothing so tender as you are over your chickens, but had you, as I have, none but kites and kestrels to your chickens, such as fly against the wind as soon as they are born, and gather themselves in arms against you when you offer to gather them, you would learn of me to leave off to be so tender. To desolation (Jerusalem) must I leave thee, desolation that taketh his watchword from thou wouldst not; desolation, the greatest name of vengeance that is; desolation, which hath as many branches of misery as hell belonging to it; desolation, the utmost arrow of God’s indignation. I cannot in terms express the one quarter this word desolation containeth. David, in the depth of his despair of God’s mercy, said he was left desolate as the pelican in the wilderness, or the owl on the house-top. This is the desolation of the pelican in the wilderness, that when she hath her bowels unnaturally torn out by her young ones (into the world tyrannously entering), and they leave her in the extremity of her torment, and will not deign her (for all her dear travail) one comforting aspect of compassion, to herself (twixt living and dying) herself she complaineth. Blood and tears equally she spendeth, and as her womb is rent out with ungrateful fruitfulness, so now her heart she rents out with self-gnawing discontentment, and dieth, not decayed by age, but destroyed by her offspring. The melancholy owl (death’s ordinary messenger), that ne’er wieldeth his lazy leaden wings but by night, and in his huge lumpish head seemeth to have the house of sleep built, then is most solitary and desolate when (restrained from tuning his own private disconsolations to the dark gloomy air) he is sent to sing on a desolate house-top a doleful dreary ditty of destiny, Alijsque dolens fit causa dolendi. Jerusalem, even as the pelican in the wilderness, so (by thine own progeny) shalt thou have thy bowels torn out; by civil wars shalt thou be more wasted than outward annoyance. Those whom thou most expectest love of shall be most unnatural to thee. Not only tears shall they constrain thee to weep, but blood, and urge thee rent out thine own heart in rueing their irreligiousness. As the owl on the house-top evermore howlingly calls for some corse, and is the first mourner that comes to any funeral, so (Jerusalem) shalt thou, howling, sit like the owl on
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thy high places and house-tops, and tune nothing but lays of ill luck and desolation, and funeral elegies of thy forlorn overthrow. Thus shalt thou sing: Sodom is sunk, and I must succeed. God promised he would ne’ermore drown the world in water, but me he hath drowned in blood. All the eagles of the field feed their young ones with my young men’s carcasses. Mine old sages & governors strow the streets with their white hairs like straws; their withered dead bodies serve to mend highways with, and turn standing quagmires to firm ground (rammed full of their corses). My virgins and matrons, instead of painting their faces ruddy, colour them with their kinsfolks’ gore. Happy is that wife which may entomb her slaughtered husband in her well or cistern. Happy is that sister that (for strewing-herbs) may scatter her dishevelled maiden hair on her dead brother’s trunk. Even as there be many fowls that eat up their own eggs, so the children are fain to feed the mother. The infant which she travails with nine months in her belly, once again hunger thrusteth into her empty famished body. The babes in conception (being half entered out of the womb, and but with one eye beholding the miseries of their country) return crying back again whence they came, and choose rather to tumble forth still-born, than view the world in such hurly-burly. So exceeding are mine adversities that after-successions which shall hear of them will even be desolate and exiled from mirth with the hearing. Adam’s fall never so woeenwrapped the earth as the relation of them shall. Christ, the son of God (all men’s Saviour but mine) fore-prophesied I should thus be left desolate, but I believed it not; therefore is my desolation unlooked for come upon me; therefore am I made a scorn to the gentiles of confusion. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, all this might’st thou have avoided; I never sought the death of a sinner; my death thou hast sought, for I laboured to save thee. Save thyself as well as thou may’st, for I have forsaken thee; to desolation have I resigned thee. If in this world thou endurest thy punishment patiently (and canst purge thy soul by repentance), in my world of joy I shall be ready to receive thee; otherwise I have naught to do with thee; thy soul, as thy house, be left desolate unto thee. Here do I confine our Saviour’s collachrymate oration, and putting off his borrowed person, restore him to the triumphancy of his Passion. Now privately (as mortal men) let us consider how his threats were after verified in Jerusalem’s overturn. Should I write it to the proof, weeping would leave me no eyes; like tragic Seneca, I should tragedize myself by bleeding to death in the depth of passion. Admirable Italian tear-eternizers, Ariosto, Tasso and the rest, ne’er had you such a subject to royalize your muses with. Of a late destruction of Jerusalem, Tasso, thou wrot’st, wherein thy Godfrey of Bouillon, the destroyer, beareth the chief part of honour. A counterfeit Melpomene (in comparison of this) was thy muse’s midwife when that child of fame was brought forth. Let no man think to enter into this history as he should, but a consumption of sorrow will
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cut him off ere he come to the end. God forbid I should be so Luciferous passionative ambitious to take upon me the full blast of this desolative trumpet of Jerusalem; a weak breath or two I will writhe into it, and with a hoarse sound (such as fitteth far-spent languorment) manifest, as it were to a dead march, her untimely interment. Forty years were expired after our Lord’s lifting up into heaven when the temple-boasting Jews (elate in their own strength) began to pretend a weariness of the Roman regiment, and coveted to reign entire lords over the lords that reigned over them. Eleazer, the son of Anani the high priest, was the first that seminarized this hope of signorizing and freedom amongst them. Proudly he controlled Agrippa and all the other lieutenants, drove them from their dignities to Rome to seek succour and rescue, and swayed over the multitude as the king and father of their lives. In the meanwhile, the element was overhung with prodigies. God thought it not enough to have threatened them by his son, but he emblazoned the air with the tokens of his terror. No star that appeared but seemed to sparkle fire. The sun did shine all day as it is wont at his evening going down. The moon had her pale silver face iron-spotted with freckle-imitating blood-sprinklings, and for her dim frosty circle, a black inky hood embailing her bright head. Over the temple (at the solemn feast of the Passover) was seen a comet most coruscant, streamed & tailed forth with glistering naked swords, which in his mouth (as a man in his hand) all at once he made semblance as if he shaked and vambrashed. Seven days it continued, all which time the temple was as clear & light in the night as it had been noonday. In the sanctum sanctorum was heard clashing and hewing of armour. Whole flocks of ravens (with a fearful croaking cry) beat, fluttered and clashed against the windows. A hideous dismal owl (exceeding all her kind in deformity and quantity) in the temple porch built her nest. From under the altar there issued penetrating plangorous howlings and ghastly dead men’s groans. A goodly young heifer, haled thither for a burnt offering, being knocked down & ready to be dressed, miraculously calved a lamb. The sacrificing knives that dived into her entrails would afterwards by no means be cleansed, but from her blood (as from man’s blood) took unto them an unremovable rust. In the Feast of Weeks, in the inner receipt of the temple was heard one stately stalking up and down, and exclaiming with a terrible bass hollow voice, Migremus hinc, migremus hinc, e templo emigremus, Let us go hence, let us go hence, out of this temple let us hie us. What should I over-black mine ink, perplex pale paper, rheumatize my readers’ eyes with the sad tedious recital of all the prognosticating signs of their ruin? Stories have lost and tired themselves in this story. Should I but make an index to any one writer of them, it would ask a book alone. Some few abbreviated allegements I will content myself with, and so pass onward to more necessary matter. Above and besides the prophetical apparitions in, over and about the temple, in the city there happened no less noteworthy predictions. The east gate thereof, which was all iron, and never wont to be opened under twenty men together (the dry rusty creaking of whose hooks and gimmers, as it was in the opening, might be heard a mile off), now of the own accord burst wide ope, and being ope, was twice more hard than before to be shut. A base mechanical fellow there was, sprung out of the mud of the commonalty, who for
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four years together before the wars begun, went crying up and down, Woe to Jerusalem and the sanctuary thereof, woe to every living thing that breatheth therein. The wars once entered, he got him on the walls, and often reiterating his stale-worn note, added thereunto, Woe, and thrice woe to myself, and with that, start a stone out of an engine in the camp and stopped his throat. Many monstrous births at this instance were brought forth; in divers places of the city sprung up founts of blood. The element every night was embattled with armed men, skirmishing and conflicting amongst themselves, and the imperial eagles of Rome were plainly there displayed to all men’s sight. A burning sword also was set forth, visibly bent against the city. The strangest and horriblest tempests of thunder and lightning had they that ever was heard of. The earth left to be so fruitful as it wont. No season but it exceeded his stinted temperature. Everything rebelled against kind, as thinking scorn to accommodate themselves to their uses that had so rebelled against the Lord. For all this, there was no man that would gather himself, no man that would depart from the ill work he had in hand. Ambulabant vt caeci quia Domino peccauerunt, Their eyes were overfilmed or blinded, because they obeyed not their Maker. Now is the time that all rivers must run into the sea, that whatsoever I have in wit or eloquence must be drained to the delineament of wretchedness. The Romans, like a drove of wild boars, root up and forage fruitful Palestine. That which was called the Holy Land is now unhallowed with their heathen swords. Wherefore you pilgrims, that spend the one half of your days in visiting the Land of Promise, and wear the plants of your feet to the likeness of withered roots by bare-legged processioning (from afar) to the Sepulchre, ungainfully you consume good hours, for no longer was Judea a land of promise than her temple stood. Vespasian’s invasion hath profaned it; a mount of dead bodies over the Sepulchre is raised which you peregrinate to adore; that Sepulchre you see, is but a thing built up by Saracens to get money with, and beguile votive Christians. They delude your superstition, and make it their tributary slave. No hogsty is now so pollutionate as the earth of Palestine and Jerusalem. Our Saviour’s steps are quite unsanctified in them, and trodden out of scent by the irruptive overtrampling of the Romans. A new story of flesh-manured earth have they cast upon it, and made it no more the walk of saints and prophets, but a poisonous nursery of beasts of prey and serpents. O God, enlarge mine invention and my memory, sincerely and feelingly to rehearse the disornamenting of this mother of cities. Understand that before the arrival of Vespasian, there were in Jerusalem three factions: Eleazer’s, which was the fundamentive and first; Jehochanan’s next; and Schimeon’s the last. Eleazar and Jehochanan, the ungodliest that ever God made, Schimeon except (and he might well have been schoolmaster to Cain or Judas, he was such a grand Kaiser of cutthroats). From the noblest of the Jews descended, but his nobility, ere he came to it, by his degenerate conditions he forfeited. A man he was that made a mockery of all laws
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and religion, and anything which authority forbade most greedily would embrace, thinking, as the best pastures are hedged in, the best orchards walled about, the best metals hutched up, so there was nothing excellent but was forbidden, and whatsoever was forbidden was excellent. For malice or hatred he would not stab or murder men so much, as against he had just occasion to stab or murder to keep his hand in ure. He held it as lawful for him (since all labouring in a man’s vocation is but getting) to get wealth as well with his sword by the highway side as the labourer with his spade or mattock, when all are but iron; besides, as there is none hath any wealth which he getteth not from another, so deemed he it as free for him as another to get from other men, concluding, as there is no better title to a kingdom than conquest, so there is no better claim unto wealth than by the conquest of a strong hand to compass it. Adultery, fornication, drunkenness, no sin but he would defend and offend in. For the multitude of these and other his abominations banished he was, and longer in Jerusalem might he not roost, wherefore no possibility had he to prevent beggary, or redeem his estate, but by proclaiming (in all places where he came) the trade he professed. The tenor of his proclamation was this, that if there were any that had dudgeon-old coughing miserly fathers they could not endure; if there were any that had repining victual-scanting masters, tyrannizing nevertheless for their work; if there were any that were creditor-crazed, and dead and buried in debt, and knew not which way to rise out of it, let them repair to him, and till doomsday they should have a protection. Yea, if there were ever a good-fellow that loved a harlot as his life, would have letterspatent to take purses, had a desire to kill and not be hanged, would swear and forswear for single money, and had not so much as a crumb of conscience to put in his pottage, let him or them whate’er resort under his standard, and their humours should be maintained. Twenty thousand of these dreggy lees of libertines hived unto him in a moment, whom he cleped the flower of chivalry, for they feared no man, and cared neither for God nor the devil. With them he burnt the green corn in the fields, plucked down barns and storehouses, stubbed up orchards and vineyards, and made desolate havoc wherever he came. To Jerusalem (after much slaughter and spoil) with this his outlaw army he reached, and there interleagued himself with Eleazar and Jehochanan. The first thing after their joining they did was the displacing of the Sanhedrin, which were the judges & threescore and ten elders, and sharing the government equally amongst them. Then the sacrifice they silenced, put the high priest to death, and converted the temple to an armoury. Long could they not agree, but as empery admitteth no mateship, so did they envy one another, made heads against one another, mutually skirmished with one another. Their enemies were without, but within lurked the plague that went thorough-stitch. Twenty thousand in one day the internal civil sword eat up. The Edomites, let in by Jehochanan, of the wealthiest citizens slew eight thousand and five hundred in one night. Here begins the desolation Christ prophesied; within and without vengeance bestirreth her; within it raged most, for within sin reigned most. Let me suddenly wax old, and woe-wrinkle my cheeks before their time by describing the deplored effects of their sins
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within. First, for the desolation of their ceremonial religion something I have said already, but the sum of all was this, that if any priest approached near the altar, the blood of him and his offering was blended together. The reverent ephods were made the slaughtermen’s aprons; many venerable Levites they bound to the altar by the hair of their beards. The vessels of the house of the Lord they put to vile uses. Not any consecrated thing but they arrested and made booty of. Young children whom their mothers led in their hands along with them to the temple to offer, (inhuman to be told) they took and merciless cast into the sacrificatory flame, and on the same altar (after they were consumed) most sacrilegiously ravished their mothers. Some men (whom they could not otherwise draw into their danger) they would invite to treaty in the temple, saying, There is the tabernacle of the Lord, there is the ark of his presence; there if we should draw our blades it were abomination unremissible. Why distrust you us? Suppose you us to be without God? Carry we not the covenant of our father Abraham in our loins as well as you? By him that oweth this temple we swear, and all the mystical riches thereof, you shall depart thence unmolested. Whoso on their oaths or their words affianced them, were sure to wash the pavement with the best juice of their breasts. Not only those that came to offer, but those that but offered to kneel in the temple, they ran through. The marble floor of it they made so slippery with their unrespited and not so much as Sabbath-ceased bloodshed, and bowel-clinging fat of them that were slain, that a man might better swim than walk on it. The place without the city where they carried their dung, and buried the entrails of beasts, half so pestilently stunk not as that stunk with dunghills of dead bodies. The entry of the court of the Lord was changed to a standing lake of blood. The silver gates of the temple no more were gates for devout worshippers to enter at, but slimy floodgates for thick-jellied gore to sluice out by. Who hath seen a vault under a church full of dust-dyed skulls and rusty dead men’s bones might (after that gross stream of gore a little was turned aside, & the blood dried up) rightly allude the temple thereunto, for now it was no more a prayer-prospering house, but a puddly vault of dead men’s bones and cast-out bodies kneaded to dirt. Her alabaster walls were all furred & foam-painted with the bespraying of men’s brains dung out against them. Her high roof was mingle-coloured with mounting drops of blood that seemed, by soaking into it, to seek for passage to heaven. The siege growing hot, the seditious’ hearts somewhat quailed, and then they made show as they would correct themselves, as they would renounce their tumultuous tyrannies. And whereas lately before they had deprived the high priest both of life and office, now (dissemblingly remorsed) they would needs, in all haste, in his room set up another, and by lots he should be chosen. The lot fell upon a plowman or carter, one Pani the son of Peniel, and he (notwithstanding his ignorant baseness and base rudeness), as in a mockery was installed in that dignity. It is not my intent to run a right-out race through all the accidents of their reprobation; only that which I lay down is to show how unfallibly Christ’s words were fulfilled, as touching their ten-times-merited desolation. Judge all those that have sense of misery, ere they have occasion to use it in discerning their own miseries, whether this were not desolation or no. The Lord at one time visited their city with these four capital plagues:
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fire, famine, pestilence and the sword. First for fire, thus he visited it: there were a thousand & four hundred storehouses filled up to the top with victual, corn, wine and oil, sufficient to maintain two hundred thousand men for twenty years, all which by the seditious was set on fire, and consumed in one day. Divers gorgeous buildings they inflamed, to smoke out their rich owners, & many goodly streets endlongs to the very earth they encindered, for nothing but to have more room to bicker in. Every corner of Jerusalem had a voice heard in it as in Ramah, of weeping, mourning, & great lamentation. Scarce could one friend in communing hear another for the howling, wringing of hands, sobbing & yelling of men, women & children. Here lay they half dead, bating and bathing in their wounds, and roaring and ear-rentingly exclaiming for some melting-hearted man to come and rid them out of their lingering living death, and slay them outright. The sons, daughters and servants of the elders thus unjustly massacred went crying up and down the city like madmen, with eyes and hands to heaven extended, Justice, Lord, justice, Lord, justice against the unjust deprivers of our friends and maintainers. This was the seditious’ order, that if there were any man noted to be of more wealth than other, him they picked a quarrel against, and accused of treason to their sanctuary, and sending letters to the Romans. False witnesses they had in pay a camp-royal. Schimeon would not see them unprovided in that case. Not only he that mourned, but he that did not seem to rejoice at the martyrdom of those just men, was dismissed the same way. Not a few (in their minds benumbed with the massacrous monstrousness of this quick martial law) made themselves graves, and went into them alive. The channel of Jordan was so over-burdened and charged with dead carcasses that the waters contended to wash their hands of them, and lightly leaped over their banks, as shunning to mix themselves with so many millions of murders, but after many days’ abstinence from their proper intercourse (observing they must live forever banished from their bounds, except they made some riddance of them) they recollected their liquid forces, and, putting all their wavy shoulders together, bare the whole shoal of them before them as far as the sea of Sodom. Had there been at that time a Red Sea new to be created, the blood (that like a river from a mountain foot flowed forth of Jerusalem) would have made it rich in surges, and sufficient to wrack many ships. Even as Jordan, so the brook Cedron, and the waters of Schiloim in like sort were choked. As dead cats and dogs into butts of sack and muscadine are thrown (for their fiery strength to feed on), so into wells and cisterns were dead corses (innumerable) thrown, for their black waters to feed on. From the fury of the sword let me descend to famine and the pestilence, the two latter plagues of Jerusalem. In giving them suitable phrase, had I the command of a thousand singular wits I should bankrupt them all in description. Pluck up a good courage, mine infant pen, and wearily struggle (as well as thou may’st) through this huge word-dearthing task.
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The storehouses burnt, the siege hard plied, the waste of victuals great, the husbanding of them none at all, there fell such an infestuous unsatiable famine amongst them, that if all the stones of Jerusalem had been bread, and they should have tired on them, yet would they have been behindhand with their appetite. Their watery weasands were like to leap out of their mouths for meat, and in their crawling up to seek passage, ready to have been seized on by their jaws for sustenance. Like an overhanging rock eaten in with the tide, or death that is ne’er pictured but with an upper chap only, so did their propendent breastbones imminent overcanopy their bellies. So many men as were in Jerusalem, so many pale raw-bone ghosts you would have thought you had seen. Even through their garments their rake-lean ribs appeared. Their sharp-embossed ankle-bones turned up the earth like a plowshare when in going their feet swerved. The empty air they would catch at instead of meat, like as a spaniel catcheth at a fly; the very dust they gnashed at as it flew, and their own arms & their legs they hardly forbare. Their teeth they would grind one against another to a white powder like meal. The dirty moss on the pentices of their houses they gnawed of most greedily. Not a weed sprung up but (ere it aspired half to his growth) by them it was weeded and ravenously ranched up. All the bushes and boughs within or round about Jerusalem were hewed down and felled, for men (like brute beasts) to browse on. Within twelve mile compass of the city, where there were wont to be the most Elysianlike gardens and flower-gilded fields under heaven, what for the Romans and them, was there not now left a crop of any gourd or green thing. The seditious and the soldiers would come running into the citizens’ houses, & taking them by the bosoms, cry aloud, Give us meat, give us meat, by the Lord we will have meat; rob, steal, run into the tents of our enemies for meat for us, or we will make meat of you and your children. Men’s cellars and garrets for meat they searched. If there were but the blood of anything spilt on the ground, like hungry dogs they would lick it up. Rats, mice, weasels, scorpions were no common men’s junkets. In the beginning of this scarcity, had any but a dishful of corn left to send to the mill, they were afraid to send it, for fear they should set all Jerusalem together by the ears for it. Wherefore in their low under-earth vaults they digged lower caves, which covering with boards and formally paving over, there they eat their corn unground (closely) because they would not be circumvented. Exceeding rich magnificoes stole victual one from another, and would lie in wait a whole week together to intercept but a chipping. The father stole from the son and oftentimes tore the meat out of his mouth; the son could scarce refrain from biting out his father’s throat-boll when he saw him swallow down a bit that he died for. The mother lurched from them both; her young weaned children (famished for want of nourishment) fastened their sharp-edged gums on her fingers, and would not let them go till she plucked the morsel out of her own maw to put into theirs. He that then had had a kingdom would have given it for a crust of bread.
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Not a butterfly, grasshopper, worm, nevet, canker but was persecuted and sought out to satisfy emptiness. You should have seen a hundred together, fighting and scrambling about a dead horse. Sometimes they would send their children far out of the city to gather roots and herbs, thinking that the Romans carried more honourable minds than to execute their utmost on them, but all was one, for they spared neither young nor old. Many noblemen eat the leather of their chariots as they rid. Miriam, a matron of great port and of a high lineage descended, (having her receipt of digestion almost closed up with fasting) after she had sustained her life a large space by scraping in chaff and muckhills for beasts’ dung, and that means forsaking her she had no other refuge of fosterment, she was constrained (for her life’s supportance), having but one only son, to kill him and roast him. Mothers of London (each one of you to yourselves), do but imagine that you were Miriam, with what heart (suppose you) could ye go about the cookery of your own children? Not hate, but hunger, taught Miriam to forget motherhood. To this purport conceit her discoursing with herself. It is better to make a sepulchre for him in mine own body than leave him to be licked up by over-goers’ feet in the street. The wrath of God is kindled in every corner of the city; famine hath sworn to leave no breathing thing in her walls; without the walls the sword more usurpeth than famine. Our enemies are merciless, for we have no eyes to see our own misery. Not they alone besiege us, but our sins also. Fire and famine afflict us. We have wherewithal to feed fire and famine, but not wherewith to feed ourselves and our children. My son, my son, I cannot relieve thee; I have gold and silver to give thee, but not a paring of any repast to preserve thee. My son, my son, why should I not kill famine by killing thee, ere famine, in excruciating thee, kill me? O my dear babe, had I in every limb of me a several life, so many lives as I have limbs to death would I resign to save thine one life. Save thee I may not, though I should give my soul for thee. The greatest debt I have bound thee to me with, is by bearing thee in my womb; I’ll bind thee to me again; in my womb I’ll bear thee again, and there bury thee ere famine shall confound thee. I will unswathe thy breast with my sharp knife, and break ope the bone-walled prison where thy poor heart is locked up to be pined; those chains and manacles of corruptive bowels (wherewith thy soul is now fettered) will I free it from. I will lend death a false key to enter into the closet of thy breast. Even as amongst the Indians there is a certain people, that when any of their kinsfolks are sick, save charges of physic, and rather resolve (unnaturally) to eat them up, than daydiversifying agues or blood-boiling surfeits should fit-meal feed on them, so do I resolve rather to eat thee up, my son, and feed on thy flesh royally, than inward emperishing famine should too untimely enage thee. Would God as the men of Ephraim were not able distinctly to pronounce shibboleth, so I could not distinctly pronounce this sweet name of my son; it is too sweet a name to come in slaughter’s mouth. Though David sung of mercy and judgement together, yet cannot I sing of cruelty and compassion together; remember I am a mother, and play the murderess, both at once. O, therefore in my words do I strive to be tyrannous, that I may be the better able to enact with my hands. Seldom or never is there any that doth ill, but speaks ill first. The tongue is the encouraging
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captain, that (with danger-glorifying persuasion) animates all the other corporeal parts to be venturous. He is the judge that dooms & determines; the rest of our faculties and powers are but the secular executioners of his sentence. Be prest, mine hands (as jailguarding officers) to see executed whatsoever your superior tongue-slaying judge shall decree. Embrawn your soft-skinned enclosure with adamantine dust, that it may draw nothing but steel unto it. Arm yourselves against my son, not as my son, but my bedintercepting bastard, begotten of some strumpet. My heart shall receive an injunction imaginarily to disinherit him. No relenting thought of mine shall retrait you with repentant affectionate humours.
A ballad in French is any song that is sung dancing.
I will blood-shot mine eyes, that all may seem sanguine they look on. Some dead man that is already slain, I’ll anatomize and embowel, the more to flesh my fingers in butchering. Ratified it is (bad-fated saturnine boy) that thou must be anthropophagized by thine own mother. Thou wert once the chief pillar of my posterity, and the whole reliance of my name; well I hoped thou shouldst have revived and new grafted thy father’s fame; I expected Jerusalem should have had a strong prop of thee. And if at any time it were war-threatened, thy right arm should have retranquillized & rejoiced it, that the young men in their merry-running madrigals and sportive base-bidding roundelays for thee should have honoured me, that the virgins on their loud tinternelling timbrels and ballad-singing dances should have descanted on my praises. Mine age of thee expected all life-expedient necessaries. My sight put not on years’ dimness so soon as it would have done, only trusting thou shouldst seal it up when death had dusked it. My beauty-creasing cares and frown-imitating wrinkles were wholly buried in the monumental grave which I (misdeeming) deemed thy sword might dig me. All these my airy-bodied expectations famine hath dispersed. I must inter thee; thou canst not entomb me. Thy little soul to heaven must be sent, to intelligence the calamity of Jerusalem; God will have pity of thee, and (perhaps) pity Jerusalem for thee. He surely will melt in remorse, and wither up the hand of his wrath, when in his ears it shall be clamoured how the desolation he hath laid on Jerusalem hath compelled a tender starved mother to kill and eat her only son. And yet his own only child, Christ Jesus (as dear to him as thou to me, my son), he sent into the world to be crucified. O sorrow-conceiving mothers, look to have all your children crucified, to have none of them remitted, since our husbands have been so hardy to lay harmful hands on the Lord of life. Can God be more grief-yielding with the loss and life-famishing of our innocent children than he was at the giving up of his own only son? That one deadly deed hath obdurated him, and made him a hard God to all mothers. Famine, the Lord hath sent thee to heap a second curse upon mothers. Never shall it be said thou took’st from me my son; his father’s falchion shall send him to sleep with his fathers. Neither shall his death be recorded as my crime in heaven’s judgement book, when I but only rid him (that is as good as dead already) out of the tedious pain of dying. I have no meat, my son, to bring thee up with. I have no ears to give idle passage to the plaints of thy pining. The enemies without and within shall divide thy blood’s guilt betwixt them. Amongst the rabblement shalt thou not miscarry; I’ll bear thee in my
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bosom to paradise. Thy tomb shall be my stomach; with thy flesh will I feast me. This shall be all the child’s tribute I will require of thee for the six years’ life I have given thee, to cherish me but six days, and rather than famine should consume me, to consume thyself in my sustenance. The foreskin of original sin shalt thou clean circumcise by this one act of piety. Return into me, and see the mould wherein thou wert cast. As much pain in thy conception endured I for thee as I will put thee to in thy departure. By nature we all desire to return to the soil from whence we came; wert thou of age to plead thine own desires, I know they would be accordant with mine. I am thy mother and must desire for thee; I love thee more than thou canst thyself; therefore cannot my desires endamage thee. Into the Garden of Eden I will lead thee; but one gap broke ope, thy entrance is made. More shalt thou terrify the seditious by the constraintment of thy quartering than if Jehovah out of a cloud should speak to them. ‘Tis not thou, but I, shall be counted opprobrious. Lo, there goes the woman, shall they say, that hath sliced & eaten her own son. I am content to undergo any shame to abash and rebuke their faces. Sword, however I have flattered thee, look for no direction from mine eyes, for though with my hands I outrage, with mine eyes I cannot. Mine eyes are womanish; my hands are manly. Mine eyes will shed tears instead of shedding blood; they will regard pitiful looks, the white skin, the comely proportion, the tender youth, the quiet lying like a lamb; my hand beholdeth none of these, and yet it is my right hand, which should do everyone right, much more mine own child. Right will I do thee (noble infant) in righting thee from the wrongs of famine. Ne’er shall the Romans have thee for their ward. Thus, thus (like blindfold Fortune) I right thee, mine eyes being veiled. At one stroke (even as these words were in speaking) she beheaded him, and when she had done, turning the apron from off her own face on his, that the sight might not afreshly distemper her, without seeing, speaking, deliberating, or almost thinking any more of him, she sod, roast and powdered him, and having eaten as much as sufficed, set up the rest. The seditious, smelling the savour of a feast (which at that time was no ordinary matter in Jerusalem), roughly (in heaps) rushed & burst into the house, saying, Wicked woman, thou hast meat, and traitorously concealest it from us; we’ll tear thee in pieces if thou set’st not part of it before us. With some few words of excuse, before them what she had she brought, entertaining them in these or like terms. Eat, I pray you; here is good meat; be not afraid; it is flesh of my flesh; I bare it, I nursed it, I suckled it. Lo, here is the head, the hands, and the feet. It was mine own only son, I tell you. Sweet was he to me in his life, but never so sweet as in his death. Behold his pale parboiled visage, how pretty piteous it looks. His pure snow-moulded soft flesh will melt of itself in your mouths; who can abstain from these two round teat-like cheeks? Be not dainty to cut them up; the rest of his body have I cut up to your hands.
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Cravens, cowards, recreants, sit you mute & amazed? Never entered you into consideration of your cruelty before? It is you that have robbed me of all my food, & so consequently robbed me of my only son. Vengeance on your souls and all the descending generations of the seed of your tribes, for thus mirroring me for the monarchmonster of mothers. No chronicle that shall write of Jerusalem’s last captivity, but shall write of me also. Not any shall talk of God’s judgement on this city but, for the cardinal judgement against it, shall recite mine enforcement to eat mine own child. I am a woman, and have killed him and eat of him. My womanish stomach hath served me to that which your manlike stomachs are dastarded with. What I have done, you have driven me to do; what you have driven me to do, now being done you are daunted with. Eat of my son one morsel yet, that it may memorize against you, ye are accessory to his dismembering. Let that morsel be his heart if you will, that the greater may be your convictment. Men of war you are, who make no conscience of tearing out any man’s heart for a morsel of bread. Most valiant captains, why forbear you? Is not here your own diet, human blood? Here is my son’s breast; pierce it once again, for once you have pierced it with famine. Are not you they that spoiled my house, and left me no kind of cherishment for me & my son? Feed on that you have slain, & spare not. O my son, O mine only son, these seditious are the devils that directed the sword against thy throat. They, with their armed hands, have crammed thy flesh into my palate. Now poison them with thy flesh, for it is they that have supplanted thee. Renowned is thine end, for in Jerusalem is none hath resisted famine but thou. Me thou hast fed; thyself thou hast freed. ‘Tis thou only that at the latter day shalt condemn these seditious. Excuse me, that only what I could not choose committed. I did all for the best. The best remedy of thine unreprievable perverse destiny was death; therefore I devoured thee, that fowls of the air might not rent thee. For sauce to thy flesh have I infused my tears; whoso dippeth in them shall taste of my sorrow. The rebels, hearing this, were wholly metamorphized into melancholy; yea, the chieftains of them were overclouded in conceit. Was never till this ever heard from Adam, that a woman eat her own child. Was never such a desolation as the desolation of Jerusalem. As touching the pestilence, some short peroration is now to succeed. Of it there died more than a hundred thousand during the time of the siege. Out of the least gate of Jerusalem (which was that towards the brook Cedron) were carried forth to burial a hundred fifteen thousand a hundred and eight persons, all which were of the nobles, gentlemen, and substantialest men of the Jews. Many fled to Titus, who when they came to meat, could eat none of it, but died with the very sight thereof. Of those that fled, a great number swallowed up their gold and their jewels, which (being clearly escaped) they sought amongst their excrements. But when by the Aramites and Arabians (Titus’ mercenary soldiers) it was perceived, they slew them outright, and ripped their bowels for their gold, and so left them to the eagles and ravens. Two thousand by this covetise slept their last. The princes of the Jews (which Titus as submissioners and succour-suers had received to mercy) he straightly examined on their allegiance and fidelity how many were dead in the city since he first beleaguered it, & the number was given up (namely, of such
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as were carried forth at all gates to be buried, & were slain in battle) seven hundred thousand, five hundred, seventy & five, besides many thousands that in the streets and temple lay unburied, and were cast down into the brook Cedron. The whole bill (when the siege was concluded) came to eleven hundred thousand, all which in fourteen months misfortuned. Sixteen thousand Titus led prisoners to Rome (those omitted which under Eleazer’s conduct perished). The sanctum sanctorum was set on fire, and the priests therein smothered. All the antique buildings were burnt and beaten down. Of David, Solomon, or the old kings of Israel was there no trophy remaining, no stone but dissituate. Jerusalem was left, not as Jerusalem, but a naked plot of ground, and as it was said of Priam’s town, Iam seges est, ubi Troia fuit, Now is that a cornfield that was erst called Troy, so that is now a mount of stones that in years past was intituled Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, what shall I say to thee more but Christ foretold thy house should be left desolate unto thee, and lo, as he foretold, it is fallen out? Of all thy gates, that were plated over with silver, is there not so much as one nail remaining. Thy streets were paved with marble, and thy houses jetted out with japhy and cedar; that pavement, those houses, thy habitation (like dust-engraven letters) is quite abrased and plowed up. Thine enemies on thy sanctuary took compassion (beholding the glory of it); thou took’st none. Titus (an infidel), understanding the multitude of thy profanations and contumacies, was afraid (having entered thee) to stay in thee, saying, Let us hence, lest their sins destroy us. Nothing thou feared’st; in old wives’ fables thou believed’st; with Talmudistical dreams (that thy temple after her destruction should be built up in a day) thyself thou deludest. And whereas thou hadst a prophecy that thy sanctuary should not be prostituted till out of thy quarters sprung a monarch of the whole earth, thou wert blinded, & wanted’st the sense in Vespasian to pick out his expletement. For he, coming into Judea but as a subjected general to the Roman empire, by his own soldiers (against his will) was there consecrated emperor, and so out of thy dominions or quarters departed he, leaving his son Titus behind him to sack thee. Math. 27:25.
See with how many deceits thou art circumvented, for calling Christ a circumventer and deceiver. For stoning him and his prophets, and using such great injustice to St. James (his cousin according to the flesh), Josephus & Eusebius agree all those plagues were laid upon thee. But to the imprecation ascribe I it rather, wherewith, when Pilate washed his hands, thou cursed’st thyself, saying, His blood be upon us and our children. In human policy another cause I conjecture. Thou lets(?) Eleazar, a private man, take the sword of thy freedom into his hands unauthorized; thou suffered’st him (unpunished) to resist the Roman provincial Florus. Ill didst thou therein, for in government (though it be to resist public violence) it is not safe to suffer a private man to undertake arms as general. The reasons hereafter I will open in some other discourse treating wholly of these matters. The chief reason of thy confusion was the ripeness of thy sins, which were seeded for want of God’s putting his sickle into them. Jerusalem, if I were to describe hell, some part of thy desolation’s description would I borrow, to make it more horrorsome. Eleven
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hundred thousand, for these few words but thou wouldst not, most wretchedly lost their lives. If but one line (thy house shall be left desolate unto thee) included all this, what doth the whole scripture include? Not a piece of a line in it that talks of the lake of fire and brimstone, but by a hundred thousand parts more importeth. It is a quiver of short arrows, which never show their length till they be full shot out, a ball of wild-fire round wrapped up together, which burneth not but cast forth, a close-winded clue, conducting those that deal unadvisedly with it into the Minotaur’s labyrinth of pain everlasting. I would wish no man to be too mild in expounding it. It hath more edges to smite with than it shows. It is not seely in operation, though it be simple in apparance. Jerusalem, not all thy seventy Esdrean cabbalizers, who traditionately from Moses received the laws’ interpretation, could ever rightly teach thee to divine of the crucified Messiah. The scripture thou madest a too too compound cabbalistical substance of, by canonizing such a multifarious genealogy of comments. Hitherto stretcheth the prosecution of thy desolation. Now to London must I turn me, London that turneth from none of thy left-hand impieties. As great a desolation as Jerusalem hath London deserved. Whatsoever of Jerusalem I have written was but to lend her a looking-glass. Now enter I into my true tears, my tears for London, wherein I crave pardon though I deal more searchingly than common soul-surgeons accustom, for in this book wholly have I bequeathed my pen and my spirit to the prosternating and enfurrowing the frontiers of sin. So let it be acceptable to God and his church what I write, as no man in this treatise I will particularly touch, none I will semovedly allude to, but only attaint vice in general.
I Kin. 19: 22.
Pride shall be my principal aim, which in London hath platformed another skyundersetting tower of Babel. Jonathan shot five arrows beyond the mark; I fear I shall shoot fifteen arrows behind the mark in describing this high-towering sin. O pride, of all heaven-relapsing preamunires the most fearful; thou that ere this hast disparadised our first parent Adam, and unrighteoused the very angels, how shall I arm mine elocution to break through the ranks of thy highly stumbling-blocks? After the destruction of Antwerp, thou (being thrust out of house and home, and not knowing whither to betake thee) at haphazard embarked’st for England. Where, hearing rich London was the full-streamed well-head, unto it thou hasted’st, & there hast dwelt many years, begetting sons and daughters. Thy sons’ names are these: ambition, vainglory, atheism, discontent, contention. Thy daughters’: disdain, gorgeous attire and delicacy. O, had Antwerp still flourished, that thou hadst ne’er come hither to misfashion us, or that there were any city would take thy children to halves with us! Thy first son, ambition, is waxed a great courtier, and maketh him wings of his long fury’s hair to fly up to heaven with; he hath a throne raised up under his heels in every startup he treads on. His back bandieth colours with the sun. The ground he thinketh extremely honoured and beholding to him if he bless it but with one humble look; nothing he talks on but quintals of pearl, the conquering of India, and fishing for
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kingdoms. Fame he makes his God, and men’s mouths the limits of his conscience. So many greater as there are than himself, so many griefs he hath. The devil may command all his heart and soul if he will rid him but of one rival. He that but crosseth him in the course of his ascension, either killeth him outright (if he be above his reach), or is sure (kill he not first) in the end to be killed by him. Poor men he looks should part with all their goods to have him but take knowledge of them; he seeks to get him a majesty in his frown, and do something to seem terrible to the multitude. Even courtesy and humility he perverteth to pride, where he cannot otherwise prey. Hath no child of pride so many disciples as this tiptoe ambition. Why call I him ambition, when he hath changed his name unto honour? I mean not the honour of the field (ambition’s only enemy), which I could wish might be ever and only honourable, but brokerly blown up honour, honour by antic fawning fiddled up, honour bestowed for damned deserts. Of this kind of honour is this elf (we call ambition) compacted. Yet will I not say but even in the highest noblest birth, and honourablest glory of arms, there may be ambition. David was ambitious when he caused the people to be numbered. Nebuchadnezzer eat grass for his ambition. Herod was ambitious when in angelical apparel he spoke to the people. The purest image of this kind of ambition was Absalom. Julius Caesar amongst the ethnics surmounted, who when he had conquered Gallia, Belgia, this our poor Albion, and the better part of Europe, and upon his return to Rome was crowned emperor, in the height of his prosperity he sent men skilled in geometry to measure the whole world, that whereas he intended to conquer it all, he might know how long he should be in overrunning it. Letters had they directed to all presidents, consuls, dukes, palatines, tetrarchs & judges of provinces to assist them and safe-conduct them. Their commission was not only to measure the earth, but the waters, the woods, the seas, the shores, the valleys, the hills and the mountains. In this discovery 30 years were spent, from his consulship to the consulship of Saturninus, when, God wot, poor man, twenty years good before they returned he was all-to-beponiarded in the senate-house, and had the dust of his bones in a brazen urn (no bigger than a bowl) barrelled up, whom (if he had lived) all the sea and earth and air would have been too little for. Let the ambitious man stretch out his limbs never so, he taketh up no more ground (being dead) than the beggar. London, of many ambitious busy heads hast thou beheld the rising and downfalling. In thy stately school are they first tutored in their art. With example thou first exaltest them, and still still lifts them up, till thou hast lifted up their heads on thy gates. What a thing is the heart of man, that it should swell so big as the whole world. Alexander was but a little man, yet if there had been a hundred worlds to conquer, his heart would have comprised them. Did men consider whereof they were made, and that the dust was their great-grandmother, they would be more humiliate and dejected; of a brittler metal than glass is this we call ambition made, and to mischances more subject. Glass with good usage may be kept and continue many ages. The days of man are
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numbered; threescore and ten is his term; if he live any longer, it is but labour and sorrow. Glass feareth not sickness nor old age; it gathereth no wrinkles with standing. It hath not so many that scout and lie in wait for his end as ambition, for he (as all mankind) is continually liable to a million of mischances, besides a legion of diseases lingering about him. Admit none of those meet with him, time with his sickle will be sure not to miss him. A man may scape a sickness, a blow, a fall, a wild beast; he cannot escape his last destiny. External dangers (such as these be) everyone is circumspect and careful to avoid; not anyone ponders in his thought how to avoid the death that grows inward. From the rich to the poor (in every street in London) there is ambition, or swelling above their states; the rich citizen swells against the pride of the prodigal courtier; the prodigal courtier swells against the wealth of the citizen. One company swells against another, and seeks to intercept the gain of each other; nay, not any company but is divided in itself. The ancients, they oppose themselves against the younger, & suppress them and keep them down all that they may. The young men, they call them dotards, & swell and rage, and with many oaths swear on the other side they will not be kept under by such cullions, but go good and near to out-shoulder them. Amongst their wives is like war. Well did Aristotle, in the second of Physics, call sins monsters of nature, for as there is no monster ordinarily reputed but is a swelling or excess of form, so is there no sin but is a swelling or rebelling against God. Sin (saith Augustine) is either thought, word or deed opposite to the eternal will of God. Then if all sins be opposing themselves against God, surely ambition (which is part of the devil’s sin) cannot but be the cherishing of open enmity against God, and so immediate I conclude, that so many ambitious men as are amongst us, so many open enemies God hath.
I Cor. 3.
Ambition is any puffed up greedy humour of honour or preferment. No puffing or swelling up in any man’s body but is a sore; when the soul doth swell with ambition, both soul and body (without timely physic of repentance) will smart full sore for it. Humility was so hard a virtue to beat into our heads that Christ purposely came down from heaven in his own person to teach it us, and continued thirty years together nothing but preaching and practising it here upon earth. The foolish things of the world (saith Paul) God chooseth, and not the haughty or ambitious in conceit. God might have chosen kings and emperors, or the scribes and Pharisees, to be his disciples, but foolish fishermen he chose. In wordly policy he used a foolish course to win credit to his doctrine, but foolish is the worldly policy that only from the devil borrows his instance. Christ chose them whom the devil scorned to look so low as to tempt, in whose hearts he had not yet laid one stone of his building. They were the only fit men to receive the impression of his spirit. Whether it be a blessing or no given to all fishermen (for the apostles’ sakes) I know not, but surely there is no one trade (in their vocation) lives so faithfully & painfully as fishermen, that in their apparel or diet less exceed. He that should have told the devil, Christ would cast his nets amongst fishermen, he would have laughed him out of his coat
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for a coxcomb. What reason, what likelihood was there? Was he born in a fisher-town? Was he allied either by the father or the mother to fishermen? Nay, how should he come almost in all his life to hear of a fisherman? Tush, tush, he will be altogether in the temple amongst the doctors, the high priests, and the elders; them will I ply and waylay against him. To their unbelief I will lend arguments. They have the seeds of ambition rooted in their hearts already. I will put in their heads that he cometh to destroy their law and their temple, and turn them all out of their stately chairs of authority, and this (I think) will tickle them thoroughly against him. Simple devil, Christ deceived thee, and only in this he deceived thee, that thou imagined’st his pride & ambition to be like thine, and never look’st for him amongst netmenders. I dare swear for thee, thou wouldst have sooner sought for him amongst carpenters. But when thou found’st how thou wert overreached, I think thou ran’st to them (from one to another) with cap in hand, to request them to betray him. And every one shaked thee off churlishly but Judas, and on him hadst thou not had power but that he carried the purse. It is a hard thing for him that carries the purse (that hath money and gold at command) not to be moved with ambition. Peter, James and John, had you been anything but beggarly fishermen, and that you had ever lived but a-hungered and cold by the sea-side, or once come into the great towns where ambition sits in her majesty and bewitcheth all eyes (before Christ met with you), the devil had caught hold of you. For your sakes all other of your profession shall fare the worse. Beware, fishermen, the devil owes you an old grudge; he takes you for dangerous men. Till your predecessors, the apostles, so went beyond him, he never suspected you, he never tempted you; now he will sooner tempt you, and be more busy about you, than kings and emperors.
4 Kings 6.
I Tim. 6.
Those that will shun ambition (for which the wrath of God hangeth heavy over this, our city) must withdraw their eyes from vanities, have something still to put them in mind whereof they are made, and whither they must. My young novice (whatever thou be) not yet crept out of the shell, I say unto thee as the prophet said to the King of Israel, Caue ne eas in locum illum, nam ibi insidiae sunt, Beware thou com’st not in that place, for there thou art beset; so beware thou com’st not to the court, or to London, for there thou shalt be beset. Beset with ambition, beset with vanity, beset with all the sins that may be. The way to know ambition, when it invades thee, is to observe and watch thyself when thou first fallest into a self-love; if self-love hath seized on thee, she will stand on no mean terms, nor be content to live as a common drudge. None (in any case) must stand in her light; the sun must shine on none but her. Whatsoever a man naturally desires is ambition. Quod habere non vis est valde bonum, quod esse non vis hoc est bonum. There is nothing is not ambition but that which a man would not have, or would not be. Having food and clothing (as Paul willeth us), let us be content; what more we require to content, is ambition. What more than the contented blessed state of an angel the devil gaped after, was that which cast him out of heaven. We are sent in warfare into this world, to bear arms and fight it out with the devil’s chief bashaw, ambition. Under
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Christ’s standard we march; he is our leader, small is his army, and but a handful in comparison of the others; his outward pomp simple, his provision (in sight) slender or none at all. If upon these considerations (as distrusting his providence) we shall grow in mislike with him, and revolt to ambition, his enemy, and betray him, shall we ever look him in the face more, or will he ever after acknowledge us? O no, not only he shall forsake us, but that rich braving bashaw, ambition (like a wise prince that will trust no traitors), as soon as ever they are come hear him, down the hill they climbed up to him shall he headlong reverse them. Even in this dilatement against ambition, the devil seeks to set in a foot of affected applause and popular fame’s ambition in my style, so as he incited a number of philosophers (in times past) to prosecute their ambition of glory in writing of glory’s contemptibleness. I resist it, and abhor it; if anything be here penned that may pierce or profit, heavenly Christ (not I) have the praise. London, look to ambition, or it will lay thee desolate like Jerusalem. Only the ambitious shaking off the yoke of the Romans was the bane of Jerusalem. The dust in the streets (being come of the same house that we are of, and seeing us so proud and ambitious) thinks with herself, why should not she that is descended as well as we, raise up her plumes as we do. And that’s the reason she borrows the wings of the wind so oft to mount into the air, and many times she dasheth herself in our eyes, as who should say, Are you my kinsmen, and will not know me? O, what is it to be ambitious, when the dust of the street (when it pleaseth her) can be ambitious? The Jews, ever when they mourned, rent their garments, as it were to take revenge on them for making them proud and ambitious, and keeping them all the while from the sight of their nakedness. Then they put on sackcloth, and that sackcloth they sprinkled over with dust, and overwhelmed with ashes, to put God in mind that if he should arm his displeasure against them, he should but contend with dust & ashes, and what glory or praise could they afford him? Shall the dust praise thee (saith David), or those that go down to the pit glorify thee? Besides, it signified that, whereas they had lifted themselves above their creation, and forgot by whom and of what they were made, now they repented & returned to their first image; in all prostrate humility they confessed that the breath of the Lord (as easy as the wind disperseth dust) might disperse them, and bring them to nothing. Did ambition afford us any content, or were it aught but a desire of disquiet, it were somewhat. O Augustine, now I call to mind the tale of thy conversion, in the sixth chapter of thy sixth book of Confessions, where describing thyself to be a young man puffed up with the ambition of that time, thou wert chosen to make an oration before the emperor, in which (having toiled thy wits to their highest wrest) thou thought’st to have purchased heaven and immortality. Coming to pronounce it, thy tongue (like Orpheus’ strings) drew all ears unto it; the emperor thou exceedingly pleased’st, because thou exceedingly & hyperbolically
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praised’st. Admiration encompassed thee, & commendation strove to be as eloquent as thou in thy commendation. But what was all this to the purpose? The bladder was burst that had so long swelled; wind thou spent’st, and naught but wind thou gained’st. For good words, good words were returned thee, like one that gave Augustus Greek verses, and he for his reward gave him Greek verses again. The heaven thou dreamed’st of, being attained, seemed so inferior to thy hopes that it cast thee headlong into hell; home again (in a melancholy) with thy companions thou returned’st, where by the way in a green meadow thou espied’st a poor drunken beggar (his belly being full) heighing, leaping and dancing, fetching strange youthful frisks, & taking care for nothing. With that thou sighed’st, and entered’st into this discourse with thy companions. O, what is ambition, that it should not yield so much content as beggary? Miserable is that life where none is happy but the miserable. Travail & care for wealth, riches and honour is but care & travail for travail and care. Mad and foolish are we who watch and study how to vex ourselves, and in hunting after a vain shadow of felicity, hunt and start up more and more causes of perplexity. This beggar hath not burnt candles all night a month together as I have done; he hath made no oration to the emperor today, and yet he is merry; I that have poured out mine eyes upon books, & well-nigh spit out all my brain at my tongue’s end this morning, am dumpish, drowsy, & wish myself dead, and yet if any man should ask me if I would willingly die, or exchange my state with this beggar, I fear I should hardly condescend. Such is my ambition; such is my foolish delight in my unrest. He having but a little money, and a few dunghill rags clouted together on his back, hath true content; I (with many grievous heart-breakings and painful complots) have laid to overtake it, and cannot. He is jocund, I am joyless; he secure, I fearful. There is no learning or art leading to true felicity, but the art of beggary. Ungrateful knowledge, that for all the body-wasting industry I have used in thy compassment hast not blessed me so much as this beggar. I having thee, he wanting thee is preferred in hearts-ease before me. No delight or hearts-ease received I from thee, for I have spoke not to teach, but to please. Vild double-faced oratory, that art good for nothing but to fatten sin with thy flattery, that callest it giving immortality when thou magnifiest vices for virtues, and challengest great deserts of kings and nobility for dissembling, here I renounce thee as the parasite of arts, the whorish painter of imperfections, and only patroness of sin.
Math. 17.
To this scope (reverend Augustine) tended thy plaintive speech, though I have not expressed it in the same words, but the operation in thee it brought forth was, that from the meditation of beggarly content, thou waded’st (by degrees) into the depth of the true heavenly content. O singular work contrived by weak means. O rarely honoured beggary, to be the instrument of recalling so rich a soul. O faithless and perverse generation (saith Christ unto us, as he said to the Jews), how long shall I be with you, how long shall I suffer you, ere my miracles work in you the like meditation? All of you are ambitious of much prosperity, long life & many days for your bodies; none of you have care of the prosperity of your souls.
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There is a place in the isle of Paphos where there never fell rain; there is a place within you called your hearts, where no drops of the dew of grace can have access. Our days are as swift as a post, yea, swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they fly, and see no good thing, yet fly you swifter to hell than they. Veniunt anni ut eant (saith Augustine), non veniunt ut stant, Years come that they may travel on, and not stand still; passing by us, they spoil us, & lay us open to the tyranny of a crueler enemy, death. O, if we love so this miserable and finite life, how ought we to love that celestial & infinite life where we shall enjoy all pleasures so plentiful that ambition shall have nothing overplus to work on! Here we labour, drudge and moil, yet for all our labouring, drudging and moiling cannot number the things we lack. We are never long at ease, but some cross or other afflicteth us. As the earth is compassed round with waters, so are we (the inhabitants thereof) compassed round with woes. We see great men die, strong men die, witty men die, fools die, rich merchants, poor artificers, plowmen, gentlemen, high men, low men, wearish men, gross men, and the fairest-complexioned men die, yet we persuade ourselves we shall never die. Or if we do not so persuade ourselves, why prepare we not to die? Why do we reign as gods on earth, that are to be eaten with worms? Should a man, with Xerxes, but enter into this conceit with himself, that as he sees one old man carried to burial, so, within threescore years, not one of all our glistering courtiers, not one of all our fair ladies, not one of all our stout soldiers and captains, not one of all this age throughout the world should be left, what a damp and deadly terror would it strike. Temples of stone and marble decay and fall down; then think not, ambition, to outface death, that art but a temple of flesh. Dives died and was buried; Lazarus died and was buried; brazen-forehead ambition, thou shalt die and be buried. King or queen whatever, thou shalt die & be buried. Alas, what mad hare-brained sots are we; we will take up a humour of ambition which we are not able to uphold, and know assuredly (ere many years) we must be thrown down from, yet come what will (at all adventures) we will go through with it; we will be gods and monarchs in our life, though we be devils after death. Over and over I repeat it double and treble, that the spirit of monarchizing in private men is the spirit of Lucifer. Christ said to his disciples, He that will be greatest amongst you shall be the least; so say I, that he which will be the greatest in any state, or seeketh to make his posterity greatest, shall be the least, the least accounted of, the least reverenced (for none that is gettingambitious, but is generally hated). His posterity (though he establish them never so) shall not hold out. Fools shall squander in an hour all the avarice of their ambitious wise ancestors. Ambition, on the sands thou buildest; regard thy soul more than thy sons & daughters; let poor men glean after thy cart; cast thy bread upon the waters. Thy greediness of the world teacheth the devil to be greedy of thy soul. He accuseth his spirits & upbraideth them of sloth by thee, saying, Mortal men in these and these many years can heap together so many thousands, and what is it that they have a mind to which they get not into their hands? But you drones & dormice (that in celerity & quickness should outstart them) lie sleeping & stretching yourselves by the hearth of hell-fire, and have no care to look about for the increase of our kingdom. Heaven-gate is no bigger than the eye of a
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needle, yet ambitious worldly men (having their backs like a camel’s bunched with cares, and betrapped with bribes and oppressions) think to enter in at it. Ambition, ambition, hearken to me; there will be a black day when thy ambition shall break his neck, when thou shalt lie in thy bed as on a rack stretching out thy joints, when thine eyes shall start out of thy head, & every part of thee be wrung as with the windcolic. In midst of thy fury and malady, when thou shalt laugh and trifle, falter with thy tongue, rattle in thy throat, be busy in folding and doubling the clothes, & scratching and catching whatsoever comes near thee, then (as the possessed with the calentura) thou shalt offer to leap and cast thyself out of the top of thine house, thou shalt burst thy bowels and crack thy cheeks in striving to keep in thy soul; when thou shouldst look up to heaven, thou shalt be overlooking thy will, and altering some clause of it when thou shouldst be commending thy spirit. In thy life hast thou sought more than what is needful, therefore at thy death shalt thou neglect that is needful. Ambition (like Jerusalem), thou knowest not the time of thy visitation, for thou hast sought in this world to gather great promotions unto thee, & not gather thyself under Christ’s wing; thy house shall be left desolate unto thee. A special branch of this ambition is avarice; as riches or covetise, there is nothing that so engenders ambition. Every tree, every apple, every grain, every herb, every fruit, every weed hath his several worm; the worm of wealth is ambition, the spur to ambition is wealth. Ambition’s self we have displed sufficiently; his supporter we will now call in question. Difficile est (saith an ancient Father) ut non sit superbus qui diues; tolle superbiam, diuitiae non nocebunt, It is a very difficult thing for him not to be proud or ambitious that is rich; take away his ambition, his riches never hurt him. Riches have hurt a great number in England, who if their riches had not been, had still been men and not Timonists. Riches, as they have renowned, so they have reproached London. It is now grown a proverb that there is no merchandise but usury. I dare not affirm it, but questionless, usury cryeth to the children of prodigality in the streets: All you that will take up money or commodities on your land or possibilities, to banquet, riot and be drunk, come unto us and you shall be furnished; for gain we will help to damn both your souls and our own. God in his mercy never call them to their audit. God in his mercy rid them all out of London, & then it were to be hoped the plague would cease, else never. Jerem. 22.
Jeremy saith, Woe be to him that buildeth his house with unrighteousness, and his chambers without equity, whose eyes and whose heart are only for covetousness and to shed innocent blood. The eyes and the heart of usurers are only for covetousness and to shed innocent blood. Mo gentlemen by their entanglement and exactions have they driven to desperate courses, and so consequently made away & murdered, than either France, the Low Countries, or any foreign siege or sea-voyage this 40 years. Tell me (almost) what gentleman hath been cast away at sea, or disasterly soldierized by land, but they have enforced him thereunto by their fleecing? What is left for a man to do, being consumed to the bare bones by these greedy horse-leeches, and not having so much
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reserved as would buy him bread, but either to hang at Tyburn, or pillage and reprisal where he may? Huge numbers in their stinking prisons they have starved, & made dice of their bones for the devil to throw at dice for their own souls. This is the course now-a-days everyone taketh to be rich: being a young trader, and having of old Mumpsimus (his avaricious master) learned to be his craft’s master, for a year or two he is very thrifty and husbandly; he pays & takes as duly as the clock strikes, he seemeth very sober and precise, and bringeth all men in love with him. When he thinketh he hath thoroughly wrung himself into the world’s good opinion, & that his credit is as much as he will demand, he goes and tries it, and on the tenterhooks stretches it. No man he knoweth but he will scrape a little book courtesy of; two or three thousand pound (perhaps) makes up his mouth. When he hath it all in his hands, for a month or two he revels it, and cuts it out in the whole cloth. He falls acquainted with gentlemen, frequents ordinaries and dicing-houses daily, where, when some of them (in play) have lost all their money, he is very diligent at hand on their chains, or bracelets, or jewels to lend them half the value; now this is the nature of young gentlemen, that where they have broke the ice and borrowed once, they will come again the second time, and that these young foxes know as well as the beggar knows his dish. But at the second time of their coming, it is doubtful to say whether they shall have money or no. The world grows hard, and we all are mortal; let them make him any assurance before a judge, and they shall have some hundred pounds (per consequence) in silks & velvets. The third time if they come, they shall have baser commodities; the fourth time, lute-strings and grey paper; and then, I pray pardon me, I am not for you; pay me that you owe me, and you shall have anything. When thus this young usurer hath thrust all his pedlary into the hands of novice heirs, & that he hath made, of his three thousand, nine thousand in bonds and recognizances (besides the strong faith of the forfeitures), he breaks, and cries out amongst his neighbours that he is undone by trusting gentlemen; his kind heart hath made him a beggar, and warns all men (by his example) to beware how they have any dealings with them. For a quarter of a year or thereabouts, he slips his neck out of the collar, and sets some grave man of his kindred (as his father-in-law or suchlike) to go and report his lamentable mischance to his creditors, and what his honest care is to pay every man his own as far as he is able. His creditors (thinking all is gospel he speaks, & that his state is lower ebbed than it is) are glad to take anything for their own, so that whereas three thousand pound is due, in his absence all is satisfied for eight hundred (his father-in-law making them believe he lays it out of his own purse). All matters thus underhand discharged, my young merchant returns, and sets up fresher than ever he did. Those bonds and statutes he hath, he puts in suit amain. For a hundred pound commodity (which is not forty pound money), he recovers by relapse some hundred pound a year. In three terms, of a bankrupt he waxeth a great landed man, and may compare with the best of his company. O intolerable usury! Not the Jews (whose peculiar sin it is) have ever committed the like.
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What I write is most true, and hath been practised by more than one or two. I have a whole book of young gentlemen’s cases lying by me, which if I should set forth, some grave ancients (within the hearing of Bow-bell) would be out of charity with me. However I fly from particularities, this I will prove, that never in any city (since the first assembly of societies) was ever suffered such notorious cozenage and villainy as is shrouded under this seventy-fold usury of commodities. It is a hundred parts more hateful than cony-catching; it is the nurse of sins, without the which the fire of them all would be extinguished, and want matter to feed on. Poets talk of enticing sirens in the sea, that on a sunny day lay forth their gold trammels, their ivory necks, & their silver breasts to entice men, sing sweetly, glance piercingly, play on lutes ravishingly, but I say there is no such sirens by sea as by land, nor women as men; those are the sirens, that hang out their shining silks and velvets, and dazzle pride’s eyes with their deceitful haberdashery. They are like the serpent that tempted Adam in paradise, who whereas God stinted him what trees and fruits he should eat on, and go no further, he enticed him to break the bonds of that stint, and put into his head what a number of excellent pleasures he should reap thereby, so whereas careful fathers send their children to this city in all gentlemanlike qualities to be trained up, and stint them to a moderate allowance, sufficient (indifferently husbanded) to maintain their credit every way, and profit them in that they are sent hither for, what do our covetous city blood-suckers, but hire panders and professed parasitical epicures to close in with them, and (like the serpent) to alienate them from that civil course wherein they were settled? ‘Tis riot and misgovernment that must deliver them over into their hands to be devoured. Those that here place their children to learn wit and see the world are like those that in Afric present their children (when they are first born) before serpents, which if the children (they so present) with their very sight scare away the serpents, then are they legitimate; otherwise they are bastards. A number of poor children & sucklings (in comparison) are, in the court and Inns of Court, presented to these serpents and stinging extortioners of London, who never fly from them, but with their tail wind them in, and suck out their souls without scarring their skin. Whether they be legitimate or no that are so exposed to these serpents I dare not determine for fear of envy, but sure legitimately (or as they should) they are not brought up that are manumitted from their parents’ awe as soon as they can go and speak. Zeuxes having artificially painted a boy carrying grapes in a handbasket, and seeing the birds (as they had been true grapes) come in flocks & peck at them, was wonderfully angry with himself and his art, saying, Had I painted the boy (which was the chief part of my picture) as well as I have done the grapes (which were but a by-accident belonging to it) the birds durst never have been so bold; so if fathers would have but as much care to paint and form the manners of their children (when they come to man’s estate) as they have well to proportion out trifles (to instruct and educate them in their trivial infant years) sure these ravenous birds (such as brokers and usurers) would never fly to them and peck at them as they do.
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O country gentlemen, I wonder you do not lay your heads together, and put up a general supplication to the parliament against those privy cankerworms & caterpillars. Which of you all but (amongst them) had his heir cozened, fetched in, and almost consumed past recovery? Besides, his mind is clean transposed from his original; all deadly sin he is infected with, all diseases are hanging about him. If one tice a prentice to rob his master, it is felony by the law; nay, it is a great penalty if he do but relieve him and encourage him, being fled from his master’s obedience and service, and shall we have no law for him that ticeth a son to rob his father? Nay, that shall rob a father of his son, rob God of a soul? Every science hath some principles in it which must be believed, and cannot be declared. The principles and practices of usury exceed declaration; believe them to be lewder than pen can with modesty express; enquire not after them, for they are execrable. De rebus male acquisitis, non gaudebit tertius heres, Ill-gotten goods never trouble the third heir. Every plant (saith Christ) my heavenly father hath not planted shall be rooted out. Plant they never so their posterity with the revenues of oppression, since God hath not planted them, they shall be ruined and rooted out. As they have supplanted other men’s posterity, so must they look to have their own posterity supplanted by others. Augustine, in the fourth chapter of his second book of Confessions, pitifully complaineth how heinously he had offended when he was a young man, in leading his companions to rob a pear-tree in their next neighbour’s orchard: Amaui perire, O Domine (he exclaims), amaui perire, amaui defectum turpis animae et disiliens a firmamento; malitiae meae causa nulla esset nisi malitia: I loved to perish (O Lord), I loved to perish; in my ungraciousness I delighted (foul of soul that I was & quite sliding from the firmament); of my malice there was no cause but malice. Of the stealing and beating down of a few pears this holy Father makes such a burdenous matter of conscience as that he counted it his utter perishing and backsliding from the firmament; usurers make no conscience of cozening and robbing men of whole orchards, of whole fields, of whole lordships; of their malice and theft there is some other cause than malice, which is avarice. If the stealing of one apple in paradise brought such an universal plague to the world, what a plague to one soul will the robbing of a hundred orphans of their possessions and fruit-yards bring? In the country the gentleman takes in the commons, racketh his tenants, undoeth the farmer. In London the usurer snatcheth up the gentleman, gives him rattles and babies for his over-racked rent, and the commons he took in, he makes him take out in commodities. None but the usurer is ordained for a scourge to pride and ambition. Therefore it is that bees hate sheep more than anything, for that when they are once in their wool, they are so entangled that they can never get out. Therefore it is that courtiers hate merchants more than any men, for that being once in their books, they can never get out. Many of them carry the countenances of sheep, look simple, go plain, wear their hair short, but they are no sheep, but sheep-biters; their wool, or their wealth, they make no other use of but to snarl & enwrap men with. The law (which was instituted to redress wrongs and oppressions) they wrest contrarily, to oppress and to wrong with. And yet that’s not so much wonder, for law, logic and the Swissers may be hired to fight for anybody, and so may an usurer (for a halfpenny gain) be hired to bite
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anybody. For as the bear cannot drink but he must bite the water, so cannot he cool his avaricious thirst but he must pluck and bite out his neighbour’s throat.
Math. 21.
Bursa Avari os est diaboli, The usurer’s purse is hell-mouth. He hath hydropem conscientiam (as Augustine saith), a dropsy conscience, that ever drinks and ever is dry. Like the fox, he useth his wit and his teeth together; he never smiles but he seizeth; he never talks but he takes advantage. He cries with the ill husbandmen (to whom the vineyard was put out in the gospel): This is the heir; come let us kill him, and we shall have his inheritance. Other men are said to go to hell; he shall ride to hell on the devil’s back (as it is in the old moral), and if he did not ride, he would swim thither in innocents’ blood whom he hath circumvented. No men so much as usurers coveteth the devil to be great with; he is called Mammon, the god or prince of this world, that is, the god and prince of usurers and penny-fathers. Nay more, every usurer of himself is a devil, since this word daemon signifieth naught but sapiens, a subtle worldy-wise man. When a legion of devils (in the land of the Gargisens) were cast forth of two men that came out of graves, they desired they might go into hogs or swine (which are usurers); many of those hogs or swine they tumbled into the sea; many of our hoggish usurers the devil tumbles for gain into the sea. Usurers (with the draff of this world) so feed and fatten the devils, that now they almost pass not of possessing any man else. The Jews were all hogs, that is, usurers, and therefore if there had been no divine restraint for it, yet nature itself would have dissuaded them from eating swine’s-flesh, that is, from feeding on one another. The prodigal child in the gospel is reported to have fed hogs, that is, usurers, by letting them beguile him of his substance. As the hog is still grunting, digging & wrooting in the muck, so is the usurer still turning, tossing, digging & wrooting in the muck of this world; like the hog he carries his snout evermore downward, & ne’er looks up to heaven.
Rom. 3. Math. 27.
Christ said it was not meet the children’s bread should be taken from them and given unto dogs; no more is it meet that the children’s living and substance should be taken from them and given unto hogs. Paul saith we must not do evil that good may come of it; there is no evil which a hoggish usurer will not do, so that good or profit may come of it. They will be sure to verify our Savior’s words, The poor have you always with you, for they will make all poor that they deal with. Such unnatural dealing they use towards their poor brethren as though they came not naturally into the world, but like those that were called Caesares, quasi caesi ex matris utero, they were also cut out of their mother’s womb when they came into the world. For this, O London, if (like Zaccheus) thou repentest not, and restor’st tenfold, thy house shall be left desolate unto thee. The cries of the fatherless and widow shall break off the angels’ hosannas and alleluias, and pluck the stern of the world out of God’s hand till he hath acquitted them. Oppression is the price of blood; into your treasuries you put the price of blood, which the Jews that killed Christ feared to do. You having many flocks of sheep of your own, and your poor neighbour but one seely lamb (which he nursed in his own bosom), that lamb have you taken away from him, and spared far better fatlings of your own.
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By your swearing & forswearing in bargaining, you have confiscated your souls long ago. There is no religion in you but love of money. Any doctrine is welcome to you, but that which beats on good works. The charity & duty that God exacts of you, you think discharged if in speech you neither meddle nor make with him; the charity to your neighbour you conjecture only consisteth in bidding good even and good morrow. Beguile not yourselves, for as there is no prince but will have his laws as well not broken as not spoken against, so will God revenge himself as well against the breakers of his laws as against those that speak against them. It is not your abrupt graces, God be praised, Much good do it you, or saying, We are naught, God amend us, sir, I drink to you, that shall stop God’s mouth, but he will come and not hold his peace; he will scatter your treasure and your store, and leave you nothing of that you have laid up, save the kingdom of heaven & the righteousness thereof. Rich usurers, be counselled betimes; surcease to enrich yourselves with other men’s loss. Hold it not enough to fall down and worship Christ, except (with the wise men of the East) you open your treasures, and present him with gold, myrrh and frankincense.
Ambro. De offici.
Math. 25.
Psalm 112.
Bring forth some fruits of good works in this life, that we may not altogether despair of you as barren trees, good for nothing but to be hewn down & cast into hell-fire. Pasce fame morientem quisquis pascendo seruare poteris; si non paueris, fame occidisti, Feed him that dies for hunger; whosoever thou art that canst preserve and dost not, thou art guilty of famishing him. Christ (at the latter day) in his behalf shall upbraid thee: When I was hungry, thou gavest me no meat; when I was thirsty, thou denied’st me drink; depart from me, thou accursed. Erogando pecuniam auges iustitiam, By laying out thy money thou increasest thy righteousness. Again, Nil diues habet de diuitijs, nisi quod ab illo postulat pauper, A rich man treasures up no more of his riches than he giveth in alms. My masters, I will not dissuade, but give you counsel to be usurers: put out your money to usury to the poor here on earth, that you may have it a hundredfold repaid you in heaven. As it is in the Psalms, A good man is merciful and lendeth, he giveth, he disperseth, he distributeth to the poor, and his righteousness remaineth forever. So that we see by that which we give we gain and not lose, and yet what do we give but that we cannot keep? For giving but back again what was first given us, and which, if we should not give, death would take from us, we shall purchase an immortal inheritance that can ne’er be plucked from us. With half the pains we put ourselves to in purchasing earthly wealth, we may purchase heaven. Wealth many times flies from them that with greatest solicitude & greediness seek after it. For heaven, it is no more but seek and it is yours, knock and it shall be opened. With less suit (I assure you) is the kingdom of heaven obtained than a suit for a pension or office to an earthly king, which though a man hath 20 years followed, and hath better than three parts and a half of a promise to have confirmed, yet if he have but a quarter of an enemy in the court, it is cashiered & nonsuited. God will not be corrupted; he is not partial as man is; he hath no parasites about him; he seeth with his own eyes, & not with the eyes of those that speak for bribes. He is not angry, or commands us to be driven back when we are importunate, but he commands us to be importunate, and is angry if we
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be not importunate. In the parable of the godless judge and the importunate widow, he teacheth that importunity may get anything of him. Luke 21.
Gene. 4.
So in the similitude of the man that came to his friend at midnight, to desire him to lend him three loaves, and his friend answered him, his door was shut, his children and servants in bed, and he could not rise himself to give them him; at length (he still continuing in knocking, & that for him neither he nor his might rest), to be rid of his importunity (not for he was his friend), he rose up, and gave him as many as he needed. How much more shall our God give us what we ask, that asketh no other trewage at our hands for giving, but asking and thanksgiving? We must hunger and thirst after righteousness, and we shall be satisfied. Hunger and thirst makes the lion to roar, the wolves to howl, oxen and kine to bellow and bray, and sheep (of all beasts the most seely and timorous) to bleat and complain; can man then (that in spirit and audacity exceedeth all the beasts of the field), hungering & thirsting after righteousness, hold his peace? Would God ever have encouraged him with a blessing to hunger and thirst, but that the extremity of hunger and thirst might drive him to the extremity of importunity and prayer? I cried unto the Lord (saith David) and he heard me. He did not coldly, bashfully, or formally only, cry to the Lord, as not caring whether he were heard or no, but he cried unto him with his whole heart; even to the Lord he cried, and he heard him. Ezekias cried unto the Lord, and he heard him. The blood of the saints under the altar (as all blood) is said to cry unto the Lord for vengeance. Thy brother Abel’s blood hath cried unto me, said God to Cain. The prayer of the fatherless and widow (which God heareth above all things) is called a cry. Usurers, you are none of these criers unto God, but those that hourly unto God are most cried out against. God hath cried out unto you by his preachers, God hath cried out unto you by the poor; prisoners on their death-beds have cried out of you, and when they have had but one hour to intercessionate for their souls, & sue out the pardon of their numberless sins, the whole part of that hour (saving one minute, when in two words they cried for mercy) have they spent in crying for vengeance against you. After they were dead, their coffins have been brought to your doors in the open face of Cheapside, and ignominious ballads made of you, which every boy would chant under your nose, yet will not you repent, nor with all this crying be awaked out of your dream of the devil and Dives. Therefore look that when on your death-beds you shall lie, and cry out of the stone, the strangullion and the gout, you shall not be heard; your pain shall be so wrestling, tearing and intolerable that you shall have no leisure to repent or pray, no, nor so much as lift up your hands, or think one good thought. Even as others have cursed you, so shall you be ready to curse God, & desire to be swallowed quick, to excourse the agony you are in.
2 Cor. 5.
As the devil in the second of Job, being asked from whence he came, answered, From compassing the earth, so you, being asked at the day of judgement from whence you come, shall answer, From compassing the earth, for heaven you have not compassed or purchased; therefore shall hell-fire be your portion. Every man shall receive of God according to that in his body he hath wrought. If in your bodies you have done no good works, of God you shall receive no good words. The words of God are deeds; he spake
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but the word, and heaven & earth were made. He shall speak but the word, and to hell shall you be had. Good deeds derived from faith are rampiers or bulwarks raised up against the devil; he that hath no such bulwark of good deeds to resist the devil’s battery cannot choose but have his soul’s city soon raced. It is not my meaning in all this discourse of good deeds to sejoin any of them from faith.
Aristot. in Ethi.
Job 15.
Good deeds are a tribute which we pay unto God for defending us from all our ghostly enemies, & planting his peace in our consciences. Instead of the ceremonial law, burnt offerings and sacrifices (which are ceased), God hath given us a new law, to love one another, that is, to show the fruits of love, which are good deeds, to one another. The widow’s oil was increased in her cruse, and her meal in her tub, only for doing good deeds to the prophet of the Lord. Few be there now-a-days that will do good deeds but for good deeds, that is, for rewards. If seats of justice were to be sold for money, we have them amongst us that would buy them up by the wholesale, and make them away again by retail. He that buys must sell; shrewd alchemists there are risen up, that will pick a merchandise out of everything, and not spare to set up their shops of buying and selling even in the temple; I would to God they had not sold and plucked down church & temple to build them houses of stone. God shall cut them off, that enrich themselves with the fat of the altar. Oues pastorem non iudicent (saith an ancient writer), quia non est discipulus supra Magistrum; multo minus deglubent, Let not the sheep judge their shepherd, because the scholar is not above his master; much less are they to fleece or pluck from their master or shepherd, to shave or to pelt him to the bare bones, to whom (for feeding them) they should offer up their fleeces. Dijs, parentibus, et magistris, saith Aristotle, non potest reddi equiualens, To the gods, our fathers, and our schoolmasters can never be given as they deserve. He was an ethnic that spoke thus; we Christians (only because he hath spoke it) will do anything against it; from God, our parents & our schoolmasters (which are our preachers) say we, can never be plucked sufficient. To make ourselves rich, we care not if we make our church like hell, where (as Job saith) Vmbra mortis et nullus ordo est, There is the shadow of death, & confusion without order. O avarice, that breaketh both the law of Moses and the law of nature in taking usury or incomes for advowsons, and not letting the land of the priests be free from tribute, those to whom thou leavest that ill-gotten usury or tribute shall be a prey to the irreligious. Fire shall consume the house of bribes. No cart that is overloaden or crammed too full but hath a tail that will scatter. Beware lest hogs come to glean after your cart’s-tail, that your heirs come not to be wards unto usurers, for they will put out their lands to the best use, of seven-score in the hundred, and make them serve out their wardship in one prison or other. The only way for a rich man to prevent robbing is to be bountiful and liberal. None is so much the thief’s mark as the miser and the carl. Give while you live (rich men), that those you leave behind you may be free from cormorants and caterpillars. If there be but in your bags one shilling that should have been the poor’s, that shilling will be the consumption of all his fellows; one rotten apple marreth all the rest; one scabbed sheep infects a whole flock.
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Even as a prince, out of his subject’s goods, hath loans, dismes, subsidies & fifteens, so God, out of our goods, demandeth a loan, a tenth, and a subsidy to the poor. Lo, the one half of my goods (saith Zaccheus) I give to the poor. Is not he an ill servant, that when his master shall into his hands deliver a large sum of money to be distributed amongst the needy and impotent, shall purse it up into his own coffers, and either give them none at all, or but the hundredth part of it? Such ill servants are we. The treasure and possessions we have are not our own, but the Lord hath given them us to give to the poor, and spend in his service; we (very obsequiously) give to the poor only the mould of our treasure, and will rather detract from God’s service than detract from our dross. Nowhere is pity, nowhere is piety; our house must needs be left desolate unto us. The idolatrous gentiles shall rise up against us, that bestowed all their wealth on fanes and shrines to their gods, and presents and offerings to their images; to the true image of God (which are the poor) we will scarce offer our bread-parings. The temple of Diana at Ephesus was two hundred years in building by all Asia. There was none that obtained any victory, but built a temple at his return to that god (as he thought) which assisted him. Not so much as the fever quartan but the Romans built a temple to, thinking it some great god because it shook them so, and another to ill fortune, in Exquiliis, a mountain in Rome, because it should not plague them at cards and dice. No fever quartans, ill fortune, or good fortune may wring out of us any good works. Our devotion can away with anything but this Pharisaical alms-giving. He that hath nothing to do with his money but build churches, we count him one of God Almighty’s fools, or else (if he bear the name of a wise man) we term him a notable braggart. Tut, tut, alms-houses will make good stables, and, let out in tenements, yield a round sum by the year. A good strong-barred hutch is a building worth twenty of those hospitals and alms-houses; our rich chuffs will rather put their helping hands to the building of a prison than a house of prayer. Our courtiers lay that on their backs which should serve to build churches and schools. Those preachers please best which can fit us with a cheap religion, that preaches faith, and all faith, and no good works but to the household of faith. Ministers and pastors (to some of you I speak, not to all), ‘tis you that have brought down the price of religion; being covetous yourselves, you preach nothing but covetous doctrine; your followers, seeing you give no alms, take example (by you) to hold in their hands too, & will give no alms. That text is too often in your mouths, He is worse than an infidel that provides not for his wife and family. You do not cry out for the altar, cry out for money to maintain poor scholars, cry out for more living for colleges, cry out for relief for them that are sick and visited; you rather cry out against the altar, cry out against the living the church hath already. It were to be wished that order were taken up amongst you which was observed in St. Augustine’s time, for then it was the custom that the poor should beg of none but the preacher or minister, and if he had not to give them, they should exclaim and cry out of him for not more effectually moving and crying out to the people for them. Had every one of you all the poor of your parishes hanging about your doors, and ready to rent your
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garments off your backs, and tear out your throats for bread every time you stirred abroad, you would bestir you in exhortation to charity and good works, and make yourselves hoarse in crying out against covetise and hardness of heart. London, thy heart is the heart of covetousness; all charity and compassion is clean banished out of thee; except thou amendest, Jerusalem, Sodom, and thou shall sit down and weep together. From ambition & avarice, his suborner, let me progress to the second son of pride, which is vainglory. This vainglory is any excessive pride or delight which we take in things unnecessary; much of the nature is it of ambition, but it is not so dangerous, or conversant about so great matters, as ambition. It is (as I may call it) the froth and seething up of ambition. Ambition that cannot contain itself, but it must hop and bubble above water. It is the placing of praise and renown in contemptible things. As he that takes a glory in estranging himself from the attire and fashions of his own country. He that taketh a glory to wear a huge head of hair like Absalom. He that taketh a glory in the glistering of his apparel and his perfumes, and thinks everyone that sees him or smells to him should be in love with him. He that taketh a glory in hearing himself talk, and stately pronouncing his words. He that taketh a glory to bring an oath out with a grace, to tell of his cozenages, his surfeitings, his drunkenness and whoredoms. He that (to be counted a cavalier & a resolute brave man) cares not what mischief he do, whom he quarrels with, kills or stabs. Such was Pausanias, that killed Philip of Macedon, only for fame or vainglory. So did Herostratus burn the temple of Diana (whereof I talked in the leaf before), to get him an eternal vainglory. The Spaniards are wonderful vainglorious. Many soldiers are most impatient vainglorious, in standing upon their honour in every trifle, & boasting more than ever they did. They are vainglorious also in commending one another for murders and brawls, which (if they weighed aright) is the most ignominy that may be. By a great oath they will swear, He is a brave delicate sweet man, for he killed such & such a one, as if they should say, Cain was a brave delicate sweet man, for killing his brother Abel. He was the first that invented this going into the field, and now it is grown to a common exercise every day after meat. Many puny poets & old ill poets are mighty vainglorious, of whom Horace speaketh: Ridentur mala qui componunt carmina; verum gaudent scribentes et se venerantur, et ultro, si taceas, laudant quicquid scripsere beati. They are of all men had in derision (saith he) that bungle and bodge up wicked verses, but yet they do honey and tickle at what they write, & wonderfully to themselves applaud and praise themselves, and of their own accord (if you do not commend them) they will openly commend themselves, and account their pens blessed whatsoever they invent. Many excellent musicians are odd fantastic vainglorious. There is vainglory in building, in banqueting, in being Diogenical and dogged, in voluntary poverty and devotion. Great is their vainglory also that will rather rear themselves monuments of marble than monuments of good deeds in men’s mouths. In a word, as Paul saith, Non est, Domine, in quo gloriari possim, sed in Cruce Domini Iesu Christi, There is no true glory, all is vainglory, but in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Jews’ vainglory and presumptuous confidence in their temple was one of the chief sins that plucked on their
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desolation. In that chapter where our Saviour gave judgement over Jerusalem, how bitterly did he inveigh against the hypocrisy and vainglory of the scribes and Pharisees. Let us examine what this hypocrisy and vainglory was he inveighed so against, and see if there be any such amongst us here in London. First, he accuseth them of binding heavy burdens and too grievous to be borne, and laying them on other men’s shoulders, and not moving them with one finger themselves. That is as much to say as states of a country should make burdenous laws to oppress and keep under the commonalty, and look severely to the observation of them, but would keep none of them themselves, nor will not so much as deign with one finger to touch them.
Exod. 23.
Jerom. on the 23 of Matthew.
Secondly, they did all their works to be seen of men. So do they that will do no good works but to be put in the chronicles after their death; so do they that publicly will seem the most precise justiciaries under heaven, but privately mitigate their sentence for money & gifts, which blind the wise, & subvert the words of the just. The especial thing Christ in the Pharisees reproveth that they did to be seen of men was the wearing of their large phylacteries. Those phylactaries (as St. Jerome saith) were broad pieces of parchment, whereon they wrote the ten commandments, and folding them up close together, bound them to their forehead, and so wore them always before their eyes, imagining thereby they fulfilled that which was said: They shall be always immovable before thine eyes. That which they had always vaingloriously before their eyes, that have we always vaingloriously in our mouths, but seldom or never in our hearts. Never was so much professing & so little practising, so many good words and so few good deeds. The third objection against the Pharisees was that they loved the highest places at feasts, the chief seats in assemblies, and greeting in the market-place, which is as much to say as that they were arrogant, haughty-minded and insolent, that they had no spirit of humility or meekness in them, they were besotted with the pride of their own singularity, they thought no man worthy of any honour but themselves. By intrusion & not standing on courtesy they got to sit highest at feasts, and be preferred in assemblies, which appeareth by that which followeth some few verses after: For whosoever will exalt himself shall be brought low, and whosoever will humble himself shall be exalted. Which inferreth that they did intrude or exalt themselves, and were not exalted otherwise; therefore they should be humbled or brought low. Divers like Pharisees have we, that will proudly exalt themselves. After this, our Saviour breathes out many woes against them. First, for shutting up the kingdom of heaven from before men, and neither entering themselves, nor suffering those that would to enter. Next, for devouring widows’ houses under pretence of long prayers. Thirdly, for compassing sea and land to seduce. Fourthly, for their false and fond distinction and interpretation of oaths. Fifthly, for tithing mint and aniseed and cumin, & leaving weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy and fidelity foreslowed; for straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. Sixthly, for making clean the outside of the cup or the platter, when within they were full of bribery and excess. Seventhly, for they
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were like unto whited tombs, which appear beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men’s bones and all filthiness. Eighthly, for they built the tombs of the prophets and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous, whose doctrine they refused to be ruled by. Which of all these eight woes but we have incurred? Peculiarly apply them I will not, for fear their reference might be offensive, but let everyone that is guilty in any of them apply them privately to himself, lest every child in the street apply them openly to his reproof. London, look to thyself, for the woes that were pronounced to Jerusalem are pronounced to thee. Thou, transgressing as grievously as she, shalt be punished as grievously. Fly from sin; take no pride or vainglory in it, for pride or vainglory in sin is a horrible sin, though it be without purpose to sin. Ah, what is sin that we should glory in it? To glory in it is to glory that the devil is our father. Doth the peacock glory in his foul feet? Doth he not hang down the tail when he looks on them? Doth the buck (having befilthed himself with the female) lift up his horns & walk proudly to the lawns? O no, he so hateth himself (by reason of the stench of his commixture), that all drooping and languishing into some solitary ditch he withdraws himself, and takes soil, and batheth till such time as there fall a great shower of rain, when being thoroughly washed and cleansed, he posteth back to his food.
August. lib. 3 de lib. arbit.
Of the peacock, of the buck, nor any other brute beast can we be taught to loathe our filth, but (contrary to nature) far worse than brute beasts, we are enamoured of the savour of it. Omne vitium eo ipso quod vitium est, contra naturam, est. Every vice, as it is a vice, is contrary to nature. Takes the devil a vainglory or pride that he is exiled out of heaven? No, he rueth, he curseth, he envies God, men and angels, that they should live in the kingdom of light, & he in the valley of darkness. What coward is there that will brag or glory he was beaten and disarmed? If we had the wit to conceive the baseness of sin, or from what abject parentage it is sprung, we would hate it as a toad, and fly from it as an adder. Not without reason have many learned writers called it bestial, for it is all derived & borrowed from beasts. Pride and inflammation of heart we borrow from the lion, avarice from the hedgehog, luxury, riot and sensuality from the hog, and therefore we call a lecherous person a boarish companion. Envy from the dog, ire or wrath from the wolf, gluttony or gormandize from the bear, and lastly sloth from the ass. So that as we apparel ourselves in beasts’ skins, in selfsame sort we clothe our souls in their sins. But if we did imitate aught but the imperfections of beasts (or of the best beasts, but the worst beasts), it were somewhat; if we had any spark or taste of their perfections, we were not so to be condemned. We have no spark, no taste; we are nothing but a compound of uncleanness. Let us not glory that we are men who have put on the shapes of beasts. Thrice blessed are beasts that die soon, and after this life feel no hell; woe unto us, we shall, if we appear to God in the image of beasts and soon redeem not from Satan the image of our creation he hath stolen from us. O singular subtlety of our enemy, so to sweeten the poison of our perdition that it should be more relishsome and pleasant unto us than the nectarized aqua
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coelestis of water-mingled blood sluiced from Christ’s side. We glory in that we are in the highway to be thrown from glory; we will not hear our folders or shepherds that would gather us to glory. Our Lord rode upon an ass when he governed the Jews under the law (in comparison of us); we are the unbroken colt (including the gentiles) which he commanded (with the ass) to be brought unto him. This thousand and odd hundred years hath he been breaking us to his hand, & now (when he had thought to have found us fit for the saddle) we are wilder and further off than ever we were. We kick and winch, and will by no means endure his managing. Wherefore (although utterly wearied with both) better he esteemeth of his old obstinate slow ass, the Jews (which therefore he cast off, for they had tired him with continual beating), than of the untoward colt (us, the gentiles) that will not be bridled. Ambition & vainglory make us bear up our necks stiffly, and bend our heads backward from the rein, but age will make us stoop thrice more forward, & warp our backs in such a round bundle that, with declining, our snouts shall dig our graves. England, thou need’st not be ambitious, thou need’st not be vainglorious, for ere this hast thou been bowed and burdened till thy back cracked. As the Israelites were ten times led into captivity, so seven times hast thou been overrun and conquered. In thy strength thou boasts; God with the weak confoundeth the strong. The least lifting up of his hand makes thy men of war fall backward. Say thou art walled with seas, how easy are thy walls overcome! Who shall defend thy walls if the civil sword waste thee? With more enemies is not India beset than thou art. Ungratefully hath God given thee long peace and plenty, since, whereas war can but breed vices, thy peace and plenty hath begot more sins than war ever heard of, or the sun hath atomi. Yet learn to leave off thy vainglory, that God may glory in thee. Learn to despise the world, despise vanity, despise thyself, to despise despising, and lastly, to despise no man. If you be of the world, you will affect the vainglory of the world; if you be not of the world, look for no glory, but contempt, from the world. It lies in your election to draw lots whether you will be heirs of the glory eternal, or enjoy the short breath of vainglory amongst men. The third son of pride is atheism, which is when a man is so tympanized with prosperity, and entranced from himself with wealth, ambition and vainglory, that he forgets he had a maker, or that there is a heaven above him which controls him. Too much joy of this world hath made him drunk. I have read of many whom extreme joy & extreme grief hath forced to run mad; so with extreme joy runs he mad; he waxeth a fool and an idiot, and then he says in his heart, There is no God. Others there be of these soul-benumbed atheists, who (having so far entered in bold blasphemies and scripture-scorning ironies against God that they think, if God be a God of any justice & omnipotence, it cannot stand with that his justice & omnipotence to suffer such despite unpunished), for their only refuge, persuade themselves there is no God, and with their profane wit invent reasons why there should be no God.
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In our Saviour’s time there were Sadducees that denied the resurrection; what are these atheists but Sadducean sectaries that deny the resurrection? They believe they must die, though they believe not the deity. By no means may they avoid what they will not admit. In the very hour of death shall appear to them a God and a devil. In the very hour of death, to atheistical Julian (who mockingly called all Christians Galileans) appeared a grisly shaggy-bodied devil, who for all (at his sight) he recantingly cried out, Vicisti, Galilaee, vicisti, Thine is the day, thine is the victory, O man of Galilee, yet would it not forbear him or give him over till it had stripped his soul forth of his fleshy rind, and took it away with him. Those that never heard of God or the devil in their life before, at that instant of their transmutation shall give testimony of them. This I assure myself, that however in pride of mind (because they would be different in paradoxism from all the world) some there be that fantasy philosophical probabilities of the Trinity’s unexistence, yet in the inmost recourse of their consciences they subscribe to him, and confess him.
Hebr. 11.
Psalm 18.
Most of them, because they cannot grossly palpabrize or feel God with their bodily fingers, confidently and grossly discard him. Those that come to God must believe that God is, and that he is a rewarder of them that seek him. They, coming against God, believe that he is not, and that those prosper best, and are best rewarded, that set him at naught. The heavens declare the glory of God, & the firmament showeth his handiwork; one generation telleth another of the wonders he hath done, yet will not these faithless contradictors suffer any glory to be ascribed to him. Stoutly they refragate and withstand that the firmament is not his handiwork, nor will they credit one generation telling another of his wonders. They follow the Pironics(?), whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the latediscovered Indians are able to show antiquities thousands before Adam. With Cornelius Tacitus, they make Moses a wise provident man, well seen in the Egyptian learning, but deny he had any divine assistance in the greatest of his miracles. The water (they say) which he struck out of a rock in the wilderness was not by any supernatural work of God, but by watching to what part the wild asses repaired for drink. With Albumazar, they hold that his leading the children of Israel over the Red Sea was no more but observing the influence of stars, and waning season of the moon that withdraweth the tides. They seek not to know God in his works, or in his son Christ Jesus, but by his substance, his form, or the place wherein he doth exist. Because some late writers of our side have sought to discredit the story of Judith, of Susanna and Daniel, and of Bel and the dragon, they think they may thrust all the rest of the Bible (in like manner) into the Jewish Talmud, and tax it for a fabulous legend. This place serveth not to stand upon proofs, or by confutation to confirm principles; neither dare I, with the weak prop of my wit, offer to uphold the high throne of the godhead, since he that but stretched out his hand to underprop the ark falling was
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Psalm 50.
presently stricken dead. O Lord, thou hast ten thousand stronger pillars than I am. I am the unworthiest of all worm-reserved wretches once to speak of thee, or name thee. My sins are alway before me. Princes will not let those come before them with whom they are displeased. I am afraid the congealed clouds of my sin will not let my prayers come near thee. O, favour thy glory though I have displeased thee with folly. I will not be so unweaponed jeopardous to overthrow both thy cause and my credit at once by overAtlasing mine invention. That which I undertake shall be only to throw one light dart at their faces from afar, and exhort all able pens to arm themselves against thine atheistical maledictors. Of atheists, this age affordeth two sorts, the inward and the outward; the inward atheist is he that devours widows’ houses under pretence of long prayers, that (like the panther) hideth his face in a hood of religion when he goeth about his prey. He would profess himself an atheist openly but that (like the Pharisees) he feareth the multitude. Because the multitude favours religion, he runs with the stream, and favours religion only for he would be captain of a multitude. To be the god of gold, he cares not how many gods he entertains. Church rights he supposeth not amiss to busy the common people’s heads with, that they should not fall aboard princes’ matters. And as Numa Pompilius in Rome and Minos in Athens kept the people in awe, and thrust what tyrannous laws they list upon them (the one under pretence he did nothing without conference of the nymph Egeria, the other under colour he was inspired in a certain hollow cave by Jupiter), so he makes conscience and the spirit of God a long side-cloak for all his oppressions and policies. A holy look he will put on when he meaneth to do mischief, and have scripture in his mouth even whiles he is in cutting his neighbour’s throat. The propagation of the gospel (good saintlike man) he only shoots at when, under suppressing of popery, he strives to overthrow all church livings. So that even as the gospel is the power of God to salvation to everyone that believeth, so is it in him the devil’s power of beguiling and undoing to everyone that believes him. He it is that turneth the truth of God to a lie, and buildeth his house by hypocrisy, that hath his mouth swept and garnished, but in his heart a whole legion of devils. The outward atheist (contrariwise) with those things that proceed from his mouth defileth his heart; he establisheth reason as his god, and will not be persuaded that God (the true God) is, except he make him privy to all the secrecies of his beginning & government. Straightly he will examine him where he was, what he did before he created heaven and earth, how it is possible he should have his being from before all beginnings. Every circumstance of his providence he will run through, and question why he did not this thing, and that thing, and the other thing, according to their humours. Being earthly bodies (unapt to ascend), in their ambitious cogitation they will break ope and ransack his closet, and if (conveniently) they may not come to it, then they will derogate and deprave him all they can. Little do they consider that, as the light which shined before Paul made him blind, so the light of God’s invisible mysteries (if ever it shine in our hearts) will confound and blind our carnal reason.
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Philosophy’s chief fullness, wisdom’s adopted father next unto Solomon, unsatiable artsearching Aristotle, that in the round compendiate bladder of thy brain conglobed’st these three great bodies (heaven, earth, and the wide world of waters), thine Icarian-soaring comprehension, tossed and turmoiled but about the bounds & beginning of Nilus, in Nilus drowned itself, being too seely and feeble to plunge through it. If knowledge’s second Solomon had not knowledge enough to engrasp one river, and allege probability of his beginning and bounding, who shall engrasp or bound the heavens’ body? Nay, what soul is so metaphysical subtle, that can humorously sirenize heaven’s soul, Jehovah, out of the concealments of his godhead? He that is familiar with all earthly states must not think to be familiar with the state of heaven. The very angels know not the day nor hour of the Last Judgement; if they know not the day nor hour of the judgement (which is such a general thing), more private circumstances of the godhead (determinately) they are not acquainted with, and if not angels (his sanctified attendants), much less are they revealed to sinners. Idle-headed atheist, ill wouldst thou (as the Romans) acknowledge and offer sacrifice to many gods, that wilt not grant one God. From thy birth to this moment of thine unbelief, revolve the diary of thy memory, & try if thou hast ne’er prayed and been heard; if thou hast been heard & thy prayer accomplished, who hath heard thee, who hath accomplished it? Wilt thou ratifiedly affirm that God is no God because (like a noun substantive) thou canst not essentially see him, feel him or hear him? Is a monarch no monarch because he reareth not his resiant throne amongst his utmost subjects? We (of all earthlings) are God’s utmost subjects, the last (in a manner) that he brought to his obedience; shall we then forget that we are any subjects of his because (as amongst his angels) he is not visibly conversant amongst us? Suppose our monarch were as far distanced from us as Constantinople, yet still he is a monarch, and his power undiminished. Indeed so did our fathers rebel, & forgot they had a king. When Richard de Coeur de Lion was warring in the Holy Land, his own brother, King John, forgot that he had a brother, & crowned himself king. But God is not absent, but present continually amongst us, though not in sight yet as a spirit at our elbows everywhere (& so delight many kings to walk disguised amongst their subjects). He treads in all our steps, he plucketh in and letteth out our breath as he pleaseth, our eyes he openeth and shutteth, our feet he guideth as he listeth. ‘Tis nothing but plenty and abundance that makes men atheists. Even as the snake which the husbandman took out of the cold and cherished in his bosom, once attained to her lively heat again, & grown fat and lusty, singled him out as the first whom she might (ungratefully) envenom with her forked sting, so God having took a number of poor outcasts (far poorer than poor frost-bitten snakes) forth of the cold of scarcity and contempt, and put them in his bosom, cherished and prospered them with all the blessings he could, they (having once plentifully picked up their crumbs, and that they imagine (without his help) they can stand of themselves), now fall to darting their stings of derision at his face, and finding themselves to be as great as they can well be amongst men, grow to envy & extenuate their maker.
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I cannot be persuaded any poor man, or man in misery (be he not altogether desperate of his estate), is an atheist. Misery (maugre their hearts) will make them confess God. Who heareth the thunder that thinks not of God? I would know who is more fearful to die, or dies with more terror and affrightment, than an atheist. Discourse over the ends of all atheists, and their deaths for the most part have been drunken, violent, and secluded from repentance. The black sooty visage of the night, and the shady fancies thereof, ascertains every guilty soul there is a sin-hating God. How can bellows blow, except there be one that binds and first imprisons wind in them? How can fire burn if none first kindle it? How can man breathe, except God puts first the breath of life into him? Who leadeth the sun out of his chamber, or the moon forth her cloudy pavilion, but God? Why doth not the sea swallow up the earth (whenas it overpeers it, and is greater than it), but that there is a God that snaffles and curbs it? Job 28.
There is a path which no fowl hath known, neither the kite’s eyes seen; the lion himself hath not walked in it, nor the lion’s whelps passed thereby. Who then knows it; who is there to trace it? Hath the vast azured canopy nothing above it whereunto it is perpendicular knit? Then why do not all things wheel and swerve topsy-turvy? Why break not thunderbolts through the clouds instead of threads of rain? Why are not frost and snow uncessantly in arms against the summer? The excellent compacture of man’s body is an argument of force enough to confirm the deity.
*Diagoras primus Deos negans.
*Disallowed by atheists.
O, why should I but squintingly glance at these matters, when they are so admirably expatiated by ancient writers? In the Resolution most notably is this tractate enlarged. He which peruseth that, & yet is *Diagorized, will never be Christianized. University men that are called to preach at the Cross and the court, arm yourselves against nothing but atheism; meddle not so much with sects & foreign opinions, but let atheism be the only string you beat on, for there is no sect now in England so scattered as atheism. In vain do you preach, in vain do you teach, if the root that nourisheth all the branches of security be not thoroughly digged up from the bottom. You are not half so well acquainted as them that live continually about the court and city how many followers this damnable paradox hath, how many high wits it hath bewitched. Where are they that count a little smattering in liberal arts & the reading over the Bible with a late comment sufficient to make a father of divines? What will their *disallowed Bible or late comments help them if they have no other reading to resist atheists? Atheists, if ever they be confuted, with their own profane authors they must be confuted. I am at my wits’ end when I view how coldly, in comparison of other countrymen, our Englishmen write. How in their books of confutation they show no wit or courage, as well as learning. In all other things Englishmen are the stoutest of all others, but being scholars, and living in their own native soil, their brains are so pestered with full platters that they have no room to bestir them. Fie, fie, shall we, because we have lead and tin mines in England, have lead and tin muses? For shame, bury not your spirits in beefpots. Let not the Italians call you dull-headed tramontani. So many dunces in
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Cambridge and Oxford are entertained as chief members into societies under pretence, though they have no great learning, yet there is in them zeal and religion, that scarce the least hope is left us we should have any hereafter but blocks and images to confute blocks and images. That of Terence is oraculized, Patres aequum censere nos adolescentulos ilico a pueris fieri senes, Our fathers are now grown to such austerity, as they would have us straight of children to become old men. They will allow no time for a grey beard to grow in. If at the first peeping out of the shell a young student sets not a grave face on it, or seems not mortifiedly religious (have he never so good a wit, be he never so fine a scholar), he is cast off and discouraged. They set not before their eyes how all were not called at the first hour of the day, for then had none of us ever been called. That not the first son that promised his father to go into the vineyard went, but he that refused and said he would not, went. That those blossoms which peep forth in the beginning of the spring are frost-bitten and die ere they can come to be fruit. That religion which is soon ripe is soon rotten. Too abortive, reverend Academians, do you make your young plants. Your preferment (following the outward appearance) occasioneth a number of young hypocrites who else had never known any such sin as dissimulation, and had been more known to the commonwealth. It is only ridiculous dull preachers (who leap out of a library of catechisms into the loftiest pulpits) that have revived this scornful sect of atheists. What king’s embassage would be made account of, if it should be delivered by a meacock and an ignorant? Or if percase he send variety of embassadors and not two of them agree in one tale, but be divided amongst themselves, who will hearken to them? Such is the division of God’s embassadors here amongst us; so many cow-baby bawlers and heavygaited lumberers into the ministry are stumbled under this college or that hall’s commendation, that a great number had rather hear a jarring black sant than one of their bald sermons. They boldly will usurp Moses’ chair without any study or preparation. They would have their mouths reverenced as the mouths of the Sibyls, who spoke nothing but was registered, yet nothing comes from their mouths but gross full-stomached tautology. They sweat, they blunder, they bounce & plunge in the pulpit, but all is voice and no substance; they deaf men’s ears, but not edify. Scripture peradventure they come off thick and threefold with, but it is so ugly daubed, plastered, and patched on, so peevishly specked & applied, as if a botcher (with a number of satin and velvet shreds) should clout and mend leather doublets and cloth breeches. Get you some wit in your great heads, my hot-spurred divines; discredit not the gospel; if you have none, dam up the oven of your utterance, make not such a big sound with your empty vessels. At least, love men of wit, and not hate them so as you do, for they have what you want. By loving them and accompanying with them, you shall both do them good and yourselves good; they of you shall learn sobriety and good life, you of them shall learn to utter your learning, and speak movingly. If you count it profane to art-enamel your speech to empierce, and make a conscience to sweeten your tunes to catch souls, religion (through you) shall reap infamy. Men are
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men, and with those things must be moved that men wont to be moved. They must have a little sugar mixed with their sour pills of reproof; the hooks must be pleasantly baited that they bite at. Those that hang forth their hooks and no bait may well enough entangle them in the weeds (enwrap themselves in contentions), but never win one soul. Turn over the ancient Fathers, and mark how sweet and honeysome they are in the mouth, and how musical & melodious in the ear. No orator was ever more pleasingly persuasive than humble Saint Augustine. These atheists (with whom you are to encounter) are special men of wit. The Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism. It is the superabundance of wit that makes atheists; will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism? No, no, either you must strain your wits an ela about theirs, and so entice them to your preachings, and overturn them, or else with disordered hail-shot of scriptures shall you never scare them. Skirmishing with atheists, you must behave yourselves as you were converting the gentiles. All antique histories you must have at your fingers’-ends. No philosopher’s confession or opinion of God that you are to be ignorant in. Ethnics with their own ethnic weapons you must assail. Infinite labyrinths of books he must run through that will be a complete champion in Christ’s church. Let not sloth-favouring innovation abuse you. Christ, when he said you must forsake all and follow him, meant not you should forsake all arts and follow him. Luke was a physician and followed him. Physicians are the only upholders of human arts. Paul was a Pharisee, & brought up in all the knowledge of the gentiles, and yet he was an apostle of Jesus Christ. Though it pleased our loving crucified Lord during his residence here upon earth miraculously to inspire poor fishermen, and disgregate his gifts from the ordinary means, yet since his ascension into heaven, meanless miracles are ceased. Certain means he hath assigned us, which he hath promised to bless, but without means no blessing hath he warrantised. When the devil would have had him of stones to make bread, he would in no kind consent; no more will he consent of blocks and stones in these days to make distributors of the bread of life. What are asses that will take upon them to preach without gifts, but bread made of stones? Even as God said unto Adam he should get or earn his bread with the sweat of his brows, so they that will have heavenly bread enough to feed themselves and a family (which is a congregation or flock) must earn it and get it with the sweat of their brows, with long labour, study & industry, toil and search after it. No one art is there that hath not some dependence upon another, or to whose top or perfection we may climb without steps or degrees of the other. Human arts are the steps and degrees Christ hath prescribed and assigned us, to climb up to [the] heaven of arts by, which is divinity. He can never climb to the top of it which refuseth to climb by these steps. No knowledge but is of God. Unworthy are we of heavenly knowledge if we keep from her any one of her handmaids. Logic, rhetoric, history, philosophy, music, poetry, all are the handmaids of divinity. She can never be curiously dressed or exquisitely accomplished if any one of these be wanting.
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Psalm 148.
God delighteth to be magnified in all his creatures, especially in all the excellentest of his creatures. Arts are the excellentest of his creatures, not one of them but descended from his throne. What saith David? Praise the Lord, sun & moon; praise him, ye bright stars; praise him, heaven of heavens, and waters that be above the heavens. That is, praise the Lord, metaphysical philosophy, which art conversant in all these matters. Into the majesty and glory of the sun and moon thou seest, the bright stars’ predominance and moving thou know’st, the heaven of heavens, and waters that be above the heavens (in part though not at large) thou comprehendest; therefore praise him in all these. Take occasion (preachers, in your sermons) from the wonders and secrets these include to extol his magnificent name, and by human arts’ abstracts to glory him. Praise ye the Lord (thus David proceeds) ye dragons and all deeps; fire, hail, snow and vapours, stormy winds and tempests, execute his word. Mountains & hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and cattle, creeping things and feathered fowls, princes and judges of the world, young men and maidens, old men and children, praise ye the name of the Lord. So that it is lawful to execute his word, that is, in preaching of his word, by similitudes and comparisons drawn from the nature & property of all these, to laud and amplify the eternity of his name. Christ, he drew comparisons from the hairs of a man’s head, from vineyards, from fig-trees, from sparrows, from lilies and a hundred suchlike. We (in this age) count him a heathen divine that allegeth any illustration out of human authors, & makes not all his sermons concloutments of scripture. Scripture we hotch-potch together, & do not place it like pearl and gold lace on a garment, here & there to adorn, but pile it and dung it up on heaps, without use or edification. We care not how we mis-speak it, so we have it to speak. Out it flies east and west; though we loose it all it is nothing, for more have we of it than we can well tell what to do withal. Violent are the most of our pack-horse pulpit-men in vomiting their duncery. Their preachings seem rather pestilential frenzies than anything else. They writhe texts like wax, and where they envy, scripture is their champion to scold, and though a whole month together so they should scold, they would not want allegations to cast in one another’s teeth. Non fuit sic a principio; iwis it was not so in the primitive church, but in our church every man will be a primate, every man will be lord & king over the flock that he feeds, or else he will famish it. This is erring from my scope; of the true use of the scripture I am to talk. Scripture, if it be used otherwise than as the last seal to confirm anything, if it be trivially or without necessity called unto witness, it is a flat taking of the name of God in vain. The phrase of sermons, as it ought to agree with the scripture, so heed must be taken that their whole sermons seem not a banquet of broken fragments of scripture, that it be not used but as the corner-stone to close up any building, that they gather fruit and not leaves, proofs and not phrases only, out of the Bible. As in battle we use the weapons and engines of all nations, so embattling ourselves against sin we must use the weapons and arts of all nations; scripture must be reserved as the last volley of the victory. It is the great ordinance which must play upon our enemies in the end & chief hazard of the fight. If we refuse, with Demosthenes, to reserve all our weighty arguments till the latter end, like the Frenchmen we shall fight valiantly at the first, but quail in the midst.
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Scripture is the chief power of God to salvation. Generals, in a pitched field, will not thrust forth their chief power first. By little and little they will train their enemy out of order with light onsets. He that will ascend must from the low valleys creep up higher and higher; with one caper or jump is not the mountain of theology to be scaled. This is it, I contend, that stars have their thrones of illumination allotted them in the firmament as well as the sun & moon, that human writers have their use of reproving vices as well as the scriptures. It is an easy matter to praise God in that wherein he hath placed the especial state-house of his praises. He which out of the barrennest and barest parts of his Lord’s dominion shall accumulate and levy to his treasury a greater tribute than he hath out of his richest provinces, shall he not (of all other) do him the most remunerablest service? Malicious and malevolent are they that will exclude any one art, or Athenian or Roman author, any one creeping worm or contemptible creature, from bearing witness of God. Paul alleged divers verses out of heathen poets, as out of Epemenides, Aratus, Menander, Theocritus; nay, what place is it in the scripture where the Holy Ghost doth not stoop himself to our capacities by human metaphors & similitudes? Our atheist we have in hand, with nothing but human reasons will be rebutted. Vaunt you ye speak from the Holy Ghost never so, if you speak not in compass of his five senses he will despise you, and flout you. He hearing everyone (that in the pulpit talks affectedly, coldly, crabbedly, or absurdly) say he talks from the mouth of God, makes both an obloquy of God’s mouth and the ministry. But ill shall his scoffs prosper with him; when he thinks he hath won the greatest prize to his wit in putting down God, God in judgement shall arise and reprove him. At the day of death, and at the day of judgement, he shall reprove him; sight-killingly with his clustered brows and cloud-begetting frowns he shall teach him both that he is, and what he is. Reverend ecclesiastical fathers, and other special-titled church substitutes, you it concerneth; our kingdom (by these atheists) is called in question in calling God’s kingdom in question. Prosecute with all your authority these Porphyrian deriders. Imitate the Athenians, who committed Anaxagoras to prison, and, but for Pericles, had put him to death, for writing but a book of the moon’s eclipses after by them she was received for a goddess. If they so far pursued the disgrace of a feigned goddess, be you twice as zealous in revenging the disparagement of the true and ever-living God. Proclaim disputations, threaten punishments, be vehement in your sermons; whatsoever you write or speak, intend it against atheism. Atheism hath overspread us; our overthrow, your overthrow, it will be, except (in time) you prevent it. Fall England, farewell peace, woe worth our weal and tranquillity if religion bids us farewell. Our house shall be left desolate unto us, for Christ of us is left desolate and forsaken. The fourth son of pride is discontent, which whomsoever it thoroughly inhabiteth, it carrieth clean away to extremes. If it light on a poor man that hath no means to prosecute it, it cutteth him off presently. If on a man of puissance (be he not more than motherwitted circumspect), to him and his family it is no less fatal. Generally it is grounded on
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pride, as when a man taketh unto him a mind above his birth or fortune, and is not able to go through with it. When he hath resolved to prize himself thus great, and so great, & some man (as proud as himself) comes and underbids him, and outbraves him. And thirdly, when (on just demerits) he hath builded but mean hopes, and those not only die in the dust, but his just demerits indignly draw unto him unjust hatred. For such is great men’s manner; anyone that is troublesome to them, or that they are indebted to, and cannot well recompense, they come to hate deadly. There is a discontent proceeding from a natural melancholy humour, or caused by surfeit or misdiet. Some by overstudying come to be discontent and dogged. I have known many whom shrewd or light housewives to their wives, unthrift obstinate children, suits in law over-ruled by letters from above, have caused to languish and droop away in discontent. The fruits of discontent are bannings, cursings, secret murmurings, outrage, murder, injustice, all which are high treasonous trespasses against God. The devil is the father of discontent. One of the greatest miseries of the damned shall be discontent. Nothing so much provoketh God to judgement as discontent. He destroyed the children of Israel whiles the meat was in their mouths, in the wilderness, for murmuring or being discontent; their discontent was said to afflict him. Many a time and oft have they afflicted me, even from my youth up, saith David in God’s person, speaking of their repining at the waters of strife. Therefore whosoever is discontent with any cross or calamity the Lord layeth upon him, afflicteth God, and must look for speedy confusion. Nothing in this life revengeth he so much as it. Hence it is so many stab, hang and drown themselves, and thereby endanger their own souls beyond mercy. It is the grievousest sentence God can pronounce against man, as to be his own executioner, whereby it appeareth that discontent is the grievousest sin that man can commit. When did you ever hear of any but the discontented man that offered violence to himself? What is the sin against the Holy Ghost (which Augustine concludeth to be nothing but desperatio morientis, to give up a man’s soul in despair) but a special branch of discontent? Wherefore did our Saviour thunder forth such a terrible woe against the causers of offence, or discontent, but that it was the most heinous scourge-procuring transgression of all others? Jonas, the Lord’s anointed prophet, for he was discontent, and grudged when he should have been sent unto Ninevah, had a torment like hell (for the time) inflicted upon him. In the whale’s belly, full of horror, despair, stench and darkness, three days and three nights he was shut. Hardly can God abstain from throwing any man down into hell, that is upbraidingly discontent. As the merry man (of all other) best thriveth in that he goes about, so the discontented man (of all other ) is most forspoken and unlucky in his enterprises. Few discontented men shall you observe that give up the ghost in their beds. There is a discontent contrary to pride, which is most pleasing to God, which is when a man grieves and is discontent because he cannot choose but sin and rebel against God. As also when he is wearied and discontent with the vanities of the world. So was the preacher when he cried, Vanity of vanities, & all thing is vanity.
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There is a tolerable discontent likewise, which David and Job had when they complained that the tabernacles of robbers did prosper, and they were in safety that provoked God. But so little of this true discontent is there in London that (almost) there is no content in it but in robbing and provoking of God. Sin is no sin (saith an ancient Father) except it be voluntary, and we take a content in committing it. Who is there that oppresseth, committeth adultery, is prodigal, sweareth, or forsweareth, but taketh a content in committing it? There we place content where we should take up discontent, and there are we discontent where we should repose our whole gladness and felicity. We are discontent if we hear our sins ripped up sharply. We are discontent if we be detained in the service of God but half an hour extraordinary. We are discontent if we be constrained to give to the poor. Every man here in London is discontent with the state wherein he lives. Everyone seeketh to undermine another. No two of one trade, but as they are of one trade, envy one another. Not two conjoined in one office but overthwart & emulate one another, and one of them undoes what the other hath done. The court is the true kingdom of discontent. There pride reigning most, discontent cannot choose but be a hanger-on. No conspiracy or war (civil or outward) but first springeth from discontent. What makes a number of our wanton wives in London conspire the deaths of their old doting husbands, but the discontent of a death-cold bed? Discontent makes heretics. Discontent is the cause of all the traitors beyond sea. Discontent caused Jerusalem’s house to be left desolate unto her. Discontent (O London) will be thy destitution, if thou takest not the better heed. The fifth son of pride is contention, which, being the youngest son he hath, is harder to be yoked or kept in than any of the other four. It is ever in arms, never out of brabblements. Look what ambition, vainglory, atheism, discontent shall consult or devise, it enacteth and goes through with. It is the lawyer’s living, the heretic’s food, the Swisser’s house and land. No crown but he challengeth a share in. No church but he will be of. On words, amphibologies, equivocations, quiddities and quantities he stands. He hunteth not after truth, but strife. He coveteth not so much to overcome as contend. These two little words, ex and per (as Cornelius Agrippa hath observed) held the Greek & Latin churches play many years together, they litigiously debating whether the Holy Ghost proceeded of the father and the son, or not of the son, but of the father by the son. So this word nisi in this sentence, Nisi manducaueritis carnem, set all the Council of Basel in an uproar. This word donec, as, Ioseph non agnouit uxorem suam donec, Joseph knew not his wife until, caused the antidicomariatans and Helvidians to deny the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary. With a thousand such errors contention raiseth his kingdom. Our divines in these days (though they yet retain many contentions of the old churches) have found out certain new ones of their own. They contend about standing and sitting, about forms & substances, about prescription and confusion of prayers. They argue, An ater sit contrarius albo, whether it be better to wear a white surplice, or a black gown, in ministering the sacraments. Which is like the conflict in Rome betwixt the Augustine
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Friars and the vulgar canons, whether Augustine did wear a black weed upon a white coat, or a white weed upon a black coat. Like the geometricians, they square about points and lines, and the utter show of things. As, this point is too long, this point is too short, this figure is too much affected, this line runs not smooth, this syllogism limpeth. As preachers, they labour not to speak properly, but intricately. Instead of bread, they give the children of their ministry stones to throw at one another, and instead of fish, serpents to sting one another. In the 13. of Matthew, the sower that went forth to sow scattered some seed by the highway side, which the fowls of the air pecked up, not unlike to them whose hawks and field-sports pick up all the seeds of Christianity that should be sown in their hearts, and a million of others whose eyes the fowls of the valley peck out before the seed of salvation can have any rooting in their souls. Other seed the sower scattered amongst stones, and the sun arising, it withered from want of earth, resembling these stony streets of London where nothing will spring up but oppression, avarice, and infidelity. Other seed he dispersed amongst thorns, and the thorns crept aloft and choked it. To those thorns I compare these thorny contentioners that choke the word of God with foolish controversies and frivolous questions. Even as the spirit led our Saviour aside into the wilderness to be tempted, so are there wicked spirits of contention amongst us that lead men aside into the woods and solitary places to be tempted. Let any (be he the veriest blockhead under heaven) raise up a faction, and he shall be followed & supported. Englishmen are all for innovation; they are clean spoiled if once in 20 years they have not a new fashion of religion. Sometimes Vitia sunt ad virtutem occasio, Contention is the occasion of seeking out the truth, but our contentions (for the most part) are the seeking to prove truth no truth after she is once found out, and preferring probability before manifest verity. We will not try her by her peers (which are the best expositors) and ancient Fathers, but by the literal law, either not expounded, or new expounded, without any quest of church decretals or canons. Were it not that in reproving contention I might haply seem contentious, I would wade a little father in this subject, yet it were to no end, since fire, the more it is stirred up, the more it burneth, and heresy, the more it is stirred and strove with, the more untoward it is. Naught but sharp discipline is a fit disputant with snarling schismatics. The Israelites, for they rooted not out the remnant of the gentile nations from amongst them, they were as goads in their sides and thorns in their nostrils; so if we root not out these remnants of schismatics from amongst us, they will be as goads in our sides and thorns in our nostrils. Melius est ut pereat unus, quam ut pereat unitas, It is better that some few perish, than unity perish. London, beware of contention; thou art counted the nursing-mother of contention. No sect or schism but thou affordest disciples to. If thou beest too greedy of innovation and contention, the sword of invasion and civil debate shall leave thy house desolate unto thee. Now come I to the daughters of pride, whereof disdain is the eldest.
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Disdain is a vice in comparison of which ambition is a virtue. It is the extreme of ambition. It is a kind of scorn, that scorneth to be compared to any other thing. None are more subject unto it than fair women, for they disdain anyone should be held as fair as they. They disdain any should go before them, or sit above them. They disdain any should be braver than they, or have more absolute pens entertained in their praises than they. This woman disdains any but she should carry the credit of wit; another, than any should sing so sweet as she; a third, that any should set forth the port and majesty in gait and behaviour like unto her. Only for disdain and pre-eminence, their husbands and their loves they draw sundry times into never-dated quarrels.
Amos 1.
Such disdain and scorn was betwixt the wives of Jacob, Rachel and Leah, because the one had children, and the other none. Such disdain was betwixt Sarah and Hagar. There was a disdain or shouldering amongst the disciples, who should be greatest. Joseph’s brethren disdained their father should love him better than he did them. Dives disdained Lazarus. In London, the rich disdain the poor. The courtier the citizen. The citizen the countryman. One occupation disdaineth another. The merchant the retailer. The retailer the craftsman. The better sort of craftsmen the baser. The shoemaker the cobbler. The cobbler the carman. One nice dame disdains her next neighbour should have that furniture to her house, or dainty dish or devise, that she wants. She will not go to church because she disdains to mix herself with base company, and cannot have her close pew by herself. She disdains to wear that everyone wears, or hear that preacher which everyone hears. So did Jerusalem disdain God’s prophets because they came in the likeness of poor men. She disdained Amos because he was a keeper of oxen, as also the rest, for they were of the dregs of the people, but their disdain prospered not with them; their house, for their disdain, was left desolate unto them. London, thy house (except thou repents(?)), for thy disdain shall be left desolate unto thee. The second daughter of pride is gorgeous attire. Both the sons and daughters of pride delight to go gorgeously. As Democritus set up his brazen shield against the sun to the intent that (continually gazing on it), he might with the bright reflection of his beamy radiation sear out his eyes and see no more vanities, so set they their rich-embroidered suits against the sun to dazzle, daunt and spoil poor men’s eyes that look upon them. Like idols, not men, they apparel themselves. Blocks and stones by the paynims & infidels are overgilded to be honoured and worshipped; so overgild they themselves to be more honoured and worshipped. The women would seem angels here upon earth, for which (it is to be feared) they will scarce live with the angels in heaven. The end of gorgeous attire (both in men and women) is but more fully to enkindle fleshly concupiscence, to assist the devil in lustful temptations. Men think that women (seeing them so sumptuously pearled & bespangled) cannot choose but offer to tender their tender souls at their feet. The women, they think that (having naturally clear beauty, scorchingly blazing, which enkindles any soul that comes near it, and adding move bavins unto it of lascivious embolsterings) men should even flash their hearts (at first sight) into the purified flames of their fair faces.
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Ever since Eva was tempted, and the serpent prevailed with her, women have took upon them both the person of the tempted and the tempter. They tempt to be tempted, and not one of them, except she be tempted, but thinks herself contemptible. Unto the greatness of their great-grandmother Eva they seek to aspire, in being tempted and tempting. If not to tempt and be thought worthy to be tempted, why dye they & diet they their faces with so many drugs as they do, as it were to correct God’s workmanship, and reprove him as a bungler, and one that is not his craft’s master? Why ensparkle they their eyes with spiritualized distillations? Why tip they their tongues with aurum potabile? Why fill they up age’s frets with fresh colours? Even as roses and flowers in winter are preserved in close houses under earth, so preserve they their beauties by continual lying in bed. Just to dinner they will arise, and after dinner go to bed again, and lie until supper. Yea, sometimes (by no sickness occasioned) they will lie in bed three days together, provided every morning before four o’clock they have their broths & their cullises with pearl and gold sodden in them. If haply they break their hours and rise more early to go abanqueting, they stand practising half a day with their looking-glasses how to pierce and to glance, and look alluringly amiable. Their feet are not so well framed to the measures as are their eyes to move and bewitch. Even as angels are painted in church windows with glorious golden fronts beset with sunbeams, so beset they their foreheads on either side with glorious borrowed gleamy bushes, which, rightly interpreted, should signify beauty to sell, since a bush is not else hanged forth but to invite men to buy. And in Italy, when they set any beast to sale, they crown his head with garlands, and bedeck it with gaudy blossoms, as full as ever it may stick. Their heads, with their top and topgallant lawn baby-caps, and snow-resembled silver curlings, they make a plain puppet-stage of. Their breasts they embusk up on high, and their round roseate buds immodestly lay forth, to show at their hands there is fruit to be hoped. In their curious antic-woven garments they imitate and mock the worms and adders that must eat them. They show the swellings of their mind in the swellings and plumpings out of their apparel. Gorgeous ladies of the court, never was I admitted so near any of you as to see how you torture poor old Time with sponging, pinning and pouncing, but they say his sickle you have burst in twain to make your periwigs more elevated arches of. I dare not meddle with ye, since the philosopher that too intentively gazed on the stars stumbled & fell into a ditch, and many gazing too immoderately on our earthly stars fall in the end into the ditch of all uncleanness. Only this humble caveat let me give you by the way, that you look the devil come not to you in the likeness of a tailor or painter, that however you disguise your bodies, you lay not on your colours so thick that they sink into your souls. That your skins being too white without, your souls be not all black within. It is not your pinches, your purls, your flowery jaggings, superfluous interlacings, and puffings up that can any way offend God, but the puffings up of your souls which therein you express. For as the biting of a bullet is not that which poisons the bullet, but the
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lying of the gunpowder in the dint of the biting, so it is not the wearing of costlyburnished apparel that shall be objected unto you for sin, but the pride of your hearts, which (like the moth) lies closely shrouded amongst the threads of that apparel. Nothing else is garish apparel but pride’s ulcer broken forth. How will you attire yourselves, what gown, what head-tire will you put on, when you shall live in hell amongst hags and devils? As many jags, blisters and scars shall toads, cankers and serpents make on your pure skins in the grave as now you have cuts, jags or raisings upon your garments. In the marrow of your bones, snakes shall breed. Your morn-like crystal countenances shall be netted over and (masker-like) caul-vizarded with crawling venomous worms. Your orient teeth toads shall steal into their heads for pearl; of the jelly of your decayed eyes shall they engender them young. In their hollow caves (their transplendent juice so pollutionately employed), shelly snails shall keep house. O, what is beauty more than a wind-blown bladder, that it should forget whereto it is born? It is the food of cloying concupiscence, living, and the substance of the most noisome infection, being dead. The mothers of the justest men are not freed from corruption; the mothers of kings and emperors are not freed from corruption. No gorgeous attire (man or woman) hast thou in this world but the wedding-garment of faith. Thy winding-sheet shall see thee in none of thy silks or shining robes; to show they are not of God, when thou goest to God, thou shalt lay them all off. Then shalt thou restore to every creature what thou hast robbed him of. All the leases which dust let out to life, at the day of death shall be returned again into his hands. In skins of beasts Adam and Eve were clothed; in naught but thine own skin at the Day of Judgment shalt thou be clothed. If thou beest more deformed than the age wherein thou died’st should make thee, the devil shall stand up and certify that with painting & physicking thy visage thou so deformed’st it, whereto God shall reply, What have I to do with thee, thou painted sepulchre? Thou hast so differenced & divorced thyself from thy creation that I know thee not for my creature. The print of my finger thou hast defaced, and with art’s vanishing varnishment made thyself a changeling from the form I first cast thee in; Satan, take her to thee; with black boiling pitch rough-cast over her counterfeit red and white, and whereas she was wont in ass’s milk to bathe her, to engrain her skin more gentle, pliant, delicate and supple, in bubbling scalding lead, and fatty flame-feeding brimstone, see thou uncessantly bathe her. With glowing hot irons, singe and suck up that adulterized sinful beauty wherewith she hath branded herself to infelicity. O female pride, this is but the dalliance of thy doom, but the intermissive recreation of thy torments. The greatness of thy pains I want portentous words to portray. Whereinsoever thou hast took extreme delight and glory, therein shalt thou be plagued with extreme & despitous malady. For thy flaring frounced periwigs, low dangled down with lovelocks, shalt thou have thy head side dangled down with more snakes than ever it had hairs. In the mould of thy brain shall they clasp their mouths, and gnawing through
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every part of thy skull, ensnarl their teeth amongst thy brains, as an angler ensnarleth his hook amongst weeds. For thy rich borders shalt thou have a number of discoloured scorpions rolled up together, and cockatrices, that kill with their very sight, shall continually stand spirting fiery poison in thine eyes. In the hollow cave of thy mouth, basilisks shall keep house, & supply thy talk with hissing when thou strivest to speak. At thy breasts (as at Cleopatra’s) aspisses shall be put out to nurse. For thy carcanets of pearl shalt thou have carcanets of spiders, or the green venomous flies cantharides. Hell’s torments were not torments if invention might conceit them. As no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, no tongue can express, no thought comprehend the joys prepared for the elect, so no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, no thought can comprehend the pains prepared for the rejected. Women, as the pains of the devils shall be doubled that go about hourly tempting, and seeking whom they may devour, so except you soon lay hold on grace, your pains in hell (above men’s) shall be doubled, for millions have you tempted, millions of men (both in soul & substance) have you devoured. To you, half your husbands’ damnation (as to Eva) will be imputed. Pride is your natural sin; that woman you account as common, which is not coy & proud. Womanhead you deem nothing else but a disdainful majestical carriage. Being but a rib of man, you will think to overrule him you ought to be subject to. Watch over your paths, look to your ways, lest the serpent (long since) having overmastered one of you, overmaster all of you, one after another. Banish pride from your bowers, and the lineal descents of your other sins are cut off; you will seem saints and not women. But for you, men would ne’er be so proud, ne’er care to go so gorgeously, ne’er fetch so many newfangles from other countries; you have corrupted them, you have tempted them, half of your pride you have divided with them. No nation hath any excess but they have made it theirs. Certain glasses there are wherein a man seeth the image of another, & not his own; those glasses are their eyes, for in them they see the image of other countries, and not their own. Other countries’ fashions they see, but never look back to the attire of their forefathers, or consider what shape their own country should give them. Themistocles put all his felicity in being descended from a noble lineage. Simonides, to be well beloved of his people or citizens. Antisthenes, in renown after his death. Englishmen put all their felicity in going pompously and garishly; they care not how they impoverish their substance to seem rich to the outward appearance. What wise man is there that makes the case or cover anything richer than the thing itself which it containeth or covereth? Our garments (which are cases and covers for our bodies) we compact of pearl and gold; our bodies themselves are naught but clay and putrefaction. If (as the case or cover of anything keeps it from dust or from soiling) so our costly skincases could keep us from consuming to dust, or being sin-soiled, it were somewhat, but they (contrariwise) resolve into dust; they are no armours against old age, but such as are harmed by old age. They wear away with continuance, even as time doth wear and forwelk us; our souls they keep not from sin-soiling, but are the only instruments so to
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soil and sin-eclipse them. They are a second flesh-assisting prison and further corrupting weight of corruption cast on our souls to keep them from soaring to heaven. Deck ourselves how we will, in all our royalty we cannot equalize one of the lilies of the field; as they wither, so shall we wanze and decay, and our place no more be found. Though our span-long youthly prime blossoms forth eye-banqueting flowers, though our delicious gleaming features make us seem the sons and daughters of the graces, though we glister it never so in our worm-spun robes and gold-flourished garments, yet in the grave shall we rot; from our redolentest refined compositions, air-pestilencing stinks and breath-choking poisonous vapours shall issue. England, the players’ stage of gorgeous attire, the ape of all nations’ superfluities, the continual masker in outlandish habiliments, great plenty-scanting calamities art thou to await, for wanton disguising thyself against kind, and digressing from the plainness of thine ancestors. Scandalous and shameful is it that not any in thee (fishermen & husbandmen set aside) but live above their ability and birth, that the outward habit (which in other countries is the only distinction of honour) should yield in thee no difference of persons; that all thy ancient nobility (almost) with this gorgeous prodigality should be devoured and eaten up, and upstarts inhabit their stately palaces who from far have fetched in this variety of pride to entrap and to spoil them. Those of thy people that in all other things are miserable, in their apparel will be prodigal. No land can so unfallibly experience this proverb, The hood makes not the monk, as thou, for tailors, serving-men, makeshifts and gentlemen in thee are confounded. For the compassment of bravery, we have them will rob, steal, cozen, cheat, betray their own fathers, swear and forswear, or do anything. Take away bravery, you kill the heart of lust and incontinency. Wherefore do men make themselves brave but to riot and to revel? Look after what state their apparel is, that state they take to them and carry, and after a little accustoming to that carriage, persuade themselves they are such indeed. Apparel, more than anything, bewrayeth his wearer’s mind. All sorts covet in it to exceed. Old age I exclude, for that covets naught but gold covetise. None (in a manner) forecast for their souls; they suffer them to go naked; with no good deeds will they clothe them. They let them freeze to death for want of the garment of faith; they famish and starve them in not supplying them with ghostly cherishment. O soul, of all human parts the most divinest and sovereignest, of all the rest art thou the most despicable and wretched! Not any part of the body but thou consultest and carest for. To every part is thy care more available than thyself. Impart but the tenths of it on thyself; be not more curious of a wimple or spot in thy vesture than thou art of spotting and thorough-staining thy dear-bought spirit with ten thousand abominations. Whiles the good angel of mercy stirs about the blood-springing pool of expiation, haste thou to bathe in it. Thou canst not bathe in it effectually unless thou strip thyself clean out of the attire of sin. All gorgeous attire is the attire of sin. The frail flesh wherein thou art invested is nothing but sin-battered armour, with many strokes of temptations assaulted and bruised, to break in to thee & surprise thee. Watch & pray, that thou be not surprised. We here in London, what for dressing ourselves,
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following our worldly affairs, dining, supping, and keeping company, have no leisure, not only not to watch against sin, but not so much as once to think of sin. In bed, wives must question their husbands about housekeeping, and providing for their children and family. No service must God expect of us but a little in Lent, & in sickness and adversity. Our gorgeous attire we make not to serve him, but to serve the flesh. If he were pleased with it, why did they ever in the old law (when they presented themselves before him in fasting and prayer) rent if off their backs, & put on coarse sackcloth and ashes? No lifting up a man’s self that God likes, but the lifting up of the spirit in prayer. One thing it is for a man to lift up himself to God, another thing to lift up himself against God. In pranking up our carcasses too proudly, we lift up our flesh against God. In lifting up our flesh, we depress our spirits. London, lay off thy gorgeous attire, and cast down thyself before God in contrition and prayer, lest he cast thee down to his indignation into hell-fire. Grievously hast thou offended, and transgressed against his divine majesty, in turning that to pride which was allotted thee for a punishment. His workmanship thou hast scorned, and counted imperfect without thine own additions put to it. Thou hast contended to be a more beautiful creator and repolisher of thyself than he. His own workmanship thou hast made him out of love with, by altering & deforming it at thy pleasure. There is no workman that regardeth or esteemeth his own workmanship after it is translated and transposed by others. Except thou quickly undoest and withdrawest all thy over-working, he will (in wreakful recompense that thou hast so disgraced him) alter thee, deform thee, translate thee, transpose thee, and leave thy house desolate unto thee. The last daughter of pride is delicacy, under which is contained gluttony, luxury, sloth & security. But properly, delicacy is the sin of our London dames. So delicate are they in their diet, so dainty and puling-fine in their speech, so tiptoe-nice in treading on the earth, as though they walked upon snakes, and feared to tread hard, lest they should turn again. Their houses so pickedly and neatly must be tricked up and tapistered, as if (like Abraham or Lot) they were to receive angels, the floor under foot glisteringly rubbed and glazed, that a Jew (if he should behold it) would suspect it for holy ground. Nothing about them but is wealth-boastingly & elaborately beautified; only their souls they keep poor and beggarly. Job scraped his sores with a potsherd; if they have any sore or noisome malady about them, they will overgild it, and make it seem more amiable than any other part of their body. Their habitations they make so resplendent and pleasurable on earth that they have no mind to go to heaven. Into heaven’s pleasures they cannot see, for their eyes are dazzled with terrestial delights. Those that will have their hearts thoroughly inflamed with the joys of the world to come must place no joy in this world, nor frame to themselves any object that may too much content. They must have something evermore to amate and check their felicity, and, with Macedon Philip, to remember them of mortality. Delicacy is naught but the art of security, and forgetting mortality. It is a kind of alchemical quintessencing a heaven out of earth. It is the exchanging of an eternal
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heaven for a short, momentary, imperfect heaven. Blessed are they that, by pining and excruciating their bodies, live in hell here on earth to avoid the hell never-ending. Many of the saints and martyrs of the primitive church, when they might have spent their days in all affluence and delicacy, and lived out of gunshot of misery, have, notwithstanding, took unto them the contemptiblest poverty that might be. They have abandoned all their goods and possessions, and in the wilderness conversed with penury and scarcity, to beat down and keep under their rebellious flesh. Some of them have drunk puddle water, and fed on the loathsomest things that might be, to bring their affection out of love with this transitory infelicity. Some of them have grated and rawed their smooth tender skins with hair-shirts and rough garments, that they might live in uncessant smart, & take no ease or rest in this life, where no rest or ease is to be taken up, but only a watchman’s lodge, to sojourn in for a night, or such a house as the moth buildeth in a garment. Others, all naked, on sharp shreds of broken flint & fragments of potsherds have spread their weary limbs, that lust in their sleep might not assail them. Holy St. Jerome, in the desert thou builts(?) thee a cell, to live out of the haunts of concupiscence, where parched & broiled in summer with the raging beams of the sun, & quivering and quaking in winter, all rivelled and weather-beaten with the sharp-driving showers & freezing northern wind, thou drunkest no kind of liquor but the ice-chilled water from the cold fountain, nor eats(?) any meat but tough dried roots. On the bare ground thou lodged’st, and with abstinence and want of sleep looked’st pale and wan. This didst thou to mortify thy insurrective mass of corruption. This didst thou to teach mortification & sobriety to these licentious times of ours. No course do we take to mortify the law of our members; all mortification we censure by the name of superstition; our fasts are no fasts, but preparatives to evening feasts; our mourning is like the mourning of an heir, who then laughs inward when he weeps most outward. It is not prayer alone may kill the old man in us; either it must be sanctified and assisted with fasting & abstinence, or it cannot cast out a spirit of such might. It is heavenly policy, as well as human policy, to weaken our enemy before we fight with him. We must weaken our enemy & God’s enemy, the flesh, with abstinence and fasting before we fight with him, or else he will be too strong for us. Physicians minister purgations before they apply any medicine. Surgeons lay corsives to any wound to eat out the dead flesh ere they can cure it. Abstinence and fasting are as corsives to eat out the dead flesh of gluttony, drunkennness and concupiscence in our loins, which so projected and eaten out, Christ is that kind Samaritan that will come and bind up our wounds, & carry us home with him to his house or kingdom everlasting. Thus much of delicacy in general; now more particularly of his first branch, gluttony, which if any country under heaven be culpable of, England is. All our friendship & courtesy is nothing but gluttony. Great men show their state and magnificence in nothing so much as gluttony. The birthday of our Saviour, his resurrection and ascension, we honour only with gluttony. How many cooks,
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apothecaries, confectioners and vintners in London now grow pursy by gluttony? Under gluttony I shroud not only excess in meat, but in drink also. Our full platters and our plentiful cups unapt us to any exercise of Christianity or prayer. We do nothing but fatten our souls to hell-fire. Our bodies we bombast and ballast with engorging diseases. Diseases shorten our days; therefore whosoever englutteth himself is guilty of his own death & damnation. Prov. 21 Jerom. Ad Eustoch.
Qui diligit epulas (saith Solomon) in egestate erit. He that loveth dainty fare shall feel scarcity. Venter maero aestuans dispumat libidinem, The belly abounding with wine and good cheer vomiteth forth lust. Gluttony were no sin, or not so heinous as it is, did it not pluck on a number of other heinous sins with it, or that we so engorging ourselves, infinite of our poor brethren hungered & starved not in the streets for want of the least dish on our tables. Very largely have I inveighed against this vice elsewhere, wherefore here I will truss it up more succinct; text upon text I could heap to show the inconvenience of it. In London I could exemplify it by many noteworthy specialities, but in so doing I should but lay down what everyone knows, and purchase no thank for my labour. To my journey’s end I haste, & descend to the second continent of delicacy, which is lust or luxury. In complaining of it, I am afraid I shall defile good words, and too long detain my readers. It is a sin that now serveth in London instead of an afternoon’s recreation. It is a trade that heretofore thrived in hugger-mugger, but of late days walketh openly by daylight like a substantial grave merchant. Of his name or profession he is not ashamed; at the first being asked of it, he will confess it. Into the heart of the city is uncleanness crept. Great patrons it hath got; almost none are punished for it that have a good purse. Every quean vaunts herself of some or other man of nobility. London, what are thy suburbs but licensed stews? Can it be so many brothel-houses of salary sensuality & sixpenny whoredom (the next door to the magistrate’s) should be set up and maintained, if bribes did not bestir them? I accuse none, but certainly justice somewhere is corrupted. Whole hospitals of ten-times-a-day-dishonested strumpets have we cloistered together. Night and day the entrance unto them is as free as to a tavern. Not one of them but hath a hundred retainers. Prentices and poor servants they encourage to rob their masters. Gentlemen’s purses and pockets they will dive into and pick, even whiles they are dallying with them. No Smithfield ruffianly swashbuckler will come off with such harsh hell-raking oaths as they. Every one of them is a gentlewoman, and either the wife of two husbands, or a bedwedded bride before she was ten years old. The speech-shunning sores and sight-irking botches of their unsatiate intemperance they will unblushingly lay forth and jestingly brag of wherever they haunt. To church they never repair. Not in all their whole life would they hear of God, if it were not for their huge swearing and forswearing by him. I am half of belief it is not a reasonable soul which effecteth motion and speech in them, but a soul-imitating devil, who (the more to despite God) goes and enliveth such licentious shapes, and (in them) enacteth more abomination and villainy than he could in
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the evillest of evil functions, which is, in devilling it simply. I wonder there is any of these she-retailing body-traffickers which, when a man cometh to try them, will easily credit him to be a man, & not rather suspect him to be a form-shifting devil disguised in man’s likeness. Utterly are they given over to the devil, and he is their god, since they serve him & not God. With many of their mercenary predecessors, in the proportion of men, have devils had carnal copulation. A guilty conscience hath occasion to distrust everything. Satan would think it a dishonour to him if he should not tempt & win unto him those whom weak-witted man can tempt and win unto him. Never will they resist Satan’s temptations that cannot resist the temptations of a fleshly tongue. In a damnable state are you, O ye excremental vessels of lust. In selling your bodies to sin, you sell them to the devil, and with a little money he buys them at your hands from Christ, that paid so dear a price for them. Half a crown or little more (or sometimes less) is the set price of a strumpet’s soul. The devil needeth never to tempt her, when for so small a value he may have her. We hate and cry out against them that like Turks and Moors sell their Christian brethren as slaves; how much more ought we to hate & cry out against them that sell themselves and their souls unto sin as slaves? Those skin-plastering painters (of whom in the treaty of gorgeous attire we dilated) do not so much alter God’s image (by artificial over-beautifying their bodies) as these do, by debasing themselves to everyone that brings coin. Ere they come to forty, you shall see them worn to the bare bone. At twenty their lively colour is lost, their faces are sodden & parboiled with French surfeits. That colour on their cheeks you behold superficialized is but Sir John White’s or Sir John Redcap’s livery. The alchemist of quicksilver makes gold. These (our openers to all comers) with quickening & conceiving, get gold. The souls they bring forth, at the latter day shall stand up and give evidence against them. The devil, to enfranchise them of hell, shall do no more but produce the misbegotten of their loins. Those that have been daily fornicatresses and yet are unfruitful, he shall accuse of ten thousand murders, by confusion of seeds and barrening their wombs by drugs. There is no such murderer on the face of the earth as a whore. Not only shall she be arraigned and impeached of defeating an infinite number of God’s images, but of defacing and destroying the mould wherein he hath appointed them to be cast. To whom much is given, of them shall much be required. God, having given them excellent gifts of beauty & wit, requireth at their hands excellent increase of them, which when he shall find contrary, he will convert the excess of his graces and gifts to the excess of scourges & curses. Tell me, you dissolute harlots, what increase do you render to God of your wits or your beauties, but wantonness? The unworthiest are you of life, of any that live. All your lifetime you do nothing but spoil others, and spoil yourselves. You mar your minds & your beauties both at once, by putting them out to bad uses. What are you but sinks and privies to swallow in men’s filth? Esay 21.
If God (as in Esay) should ask our watchman the devil, Custos, quid de nocte, Watchman, what seest thou? what seest thou in London by night? he would answer, I see a number of
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whores making men drunk to cozen them of their money. I see others of them sharing half with the bawds, their hostesses, & laughing at the punies they have lurched. Others meeting with their cutpurse paramours in the dark, to whom they deliver what they have been getting all day from a dozen. I see revelling, dancing and banqueting till midnight. I see a number of wives cuckolding their husbands under pretence of going to their next neighbour’s labour. I see gentlewomen baking in their painting on their faces by the fire, and burning out many pounds of candle in pinning their treble rebatoes, when they will not bestow the snuff of a light on looking on any good book. I see theft, murder and conspiracy following their business very closely. What would you have more? Those whom the sun sees not in a month together, I now see in their cups and their jollity. Well conceited was that Italian who write the Supplication to Candlelight, earnestly desiring her by writing to disclose unto him the rare secrets she saw in her empery. One judgement-day is scarce enough for God to take the confession alone of candlelight. He had need of a night of judgment as well as a day, to indict the sinners of the night. Provident justices, to whom these abuses’ redress appertaineth, take a little pains to visit these house of hospitality by night, and you shall see what courts of good-fellowship they keep. Hoise up bawds in the subsidy book, for the plenty they live in is princely. A great office is not so gainful as the principalship of a college of courtesans. No merchant in riches may compare with those merchants of maidenhead, if their female inmates were not so fleeting & uncertain. This is a trick amongst all bawds; they will feign themselves to be zealous Catholics, and whereas they dare not come to church, or into any open assembly, for wondering and hooting at, they pretend scrupulosity of conscience, and that they refrain only for religion. So if they be imprisoned or carried to Bridewell for their bawdry, they give out they suffer for the church. Great cunning do they ascribe to their art, as the discerning (by the very countenance) a man that hath crowns in his purse, the fine closing in with the next justice or alderman’s deputy of the ward, the winning love of neighbours round about, to repel violence if haply their houses should be environed, or any in them prove unruly (being pilled and polled too unconscionably). They forecast for back-doors to come in and out by undiscovered. Sliding windows also, and trap-boards in floors, to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket. Some one gentleman generally acquainted they give his admission unto sans fee, & free privilege thenceforward in their nunnery, to procure them frequentance. Awake your wits, grave authorized law-distributors, and show yourselves as insinuative subtle in smoking this city-Sodoming trade out of his starting-holes as the professors of it are in underpropping it. Either you do not, or will not, descend into their deep-juggling legerdemain. Any excuse or unlikely pretext goes for payment. Set up a shop of incontinency whoso will, let him have but one letter of an honest name to grace it. In such a place dwells a wise woman that tells fortunes, and she (under that shadow) hath her house never empty of forlorn unfortunate dames, married to old husbands.
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In another corner inhabiteth a physician and a conjurer, who hath corners and spare chambers to hide carrion in, and can conjure up an unphysical drab at all times. In a third place is there a gross-pencilled painter who works all in oil colours, & under colour of drawing of pictures draws more to his shady pavilion than depart thence pure vestals. Lodge these bawds any suspicious gentlewoman, and being asked what she is (be she young and brave), they will answer that she is an esquire’s or knight’s daughter sent up to be placed with I wot not what lady or countess. Be she of middle years, she is a widow that hath suits in law here at the term, and hath been a long Council-table petitioner. Be she but civilly plain, and in her apparel citizenized, she is the goodwife’s niece, or near kinswoman. Thus have they evasions for all objections, and are never (lightly) brought in question but when they break and jar with their neighbours. Monstrous creatures are they; marvel is it fire from heaven consumes not London, as long as they are in it. A thousand parts better were it to have public stews than to let them keep private stews as they do. The world would count me the most licentiate loose strayer under heaven if I should unrip but half so much of their venereal Machiavelism as I have looked into. We have not English words enough to unfold it. Positions & instructions have they to make their whores a hundred times more whorish and treacherous than their own wicked affects (resigned to the devil’s disposing) can make them. Waters and receipts have they to enable a man to the act after he is spent, dormative potions to procure deadly sleep, that when the hackney he hath paid for lies by him, he may have no power to deal with her, but she may steal from him while he is in his deep memento, and make her gain of three or four other. I am weary of recapitulating their roguery. I would those that should reform it would take but half the pains in supplanting it that I have done in disclosing it. Repent, repent, you ruins of intemperance; recover your souls though you have sudded your bodies. Let not your feet be fast locked in the mire of pollution. Meditate but what a brutish thing it is, how short lasting, and but a minute contentive. If you should lend it (from the beginning to the ending) but suitable descriptionate politure, or if with your eyes you could but view the meeting of venoms, I know it would work in some of you an abjuring dislike. Consider but what loathsome things are engendered of the excess of it, and how the soul (which was made to mount upward) in the heat of it descends downward. Sin enough of yourselves (women) have you; you need have no sin put into you. Your flesh of the own accord will corrupt faster than you would, though you corrupt it not before his time with inordinate carnal sluttishness. Make not your bodies stinking dungeons for diseases to dwell in; imprison not your souls in a sink.
Prov. 29. I Cor. 6. Acts 15. Ephe. 5.
To you, men, this admonition I will give: be prodigal any way rather than give a whore an earnest-penny of her perdition. Solomon saith, Qui nutrit scortum perdit substantiam, He that keepeth a harlot squandereth his substance. Paul saith, Qui fornicatur, in corpus suum peccat, He which committeth fornication sinneth against his own flesh. In the Acts it is said, Abstinete vos a fornicatione, Abstain from fornication. In the epistle to the Galatians, The works of the flesh are adultery, fornications, etc. In the epistle to the
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Jerom. super Amos.
Ephesians, No whoremonger, adulterer, or covetous person shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. Hebrew the 13: Adulterers God will judge. Deuteronomy the 23: There shall not be a harlot of the daughters of Israel. Matthew the tenth, Whom God hath joined, let no man separate. An adulterer goes betwixt or separates whom God hath joined. Cum cetera possit Deus, etc. When God can do all things else, he cannot restore a virgin after she is deflowered. Laesa pudicitia, saith Ovid, deperit illa semel, Chastity, being once scarred, is never salved. Agamemnon defiling Brisis, his wife Clytemnestra played false with Aegisthus in the meantime. On the other side, Ulysses shunning the enchantments of Circes, the sweet descant of the sirens, and immortality of Calypso to live with his constant wife Penelope, she (notwithstanding all the gallant troops of Grecian wooers’ enticements, that in her house kept a standing court a long time) kept herself chaste for him twenty years. Solon ordained that the adulterer should be put to death. The tale of Zaleucus & his son is stale. I have made my book too great already, only in displaying the sins of London. Whosoever they be that have souls, and would in no means have them miscarry, let them remember that of St. Augustine, In pollutione anima fit tota caro, In adultery or fornication the soul is made all flesh, & is wholly employed in impoverishing and debilitating the flesh. Quidam dixit olim, diues eram dudum, sed tria me fecerunt nudum, alea, vina, venus; tribus his factus sum egenus. There was a man said late he was in rich estate but 3 things have undone him, forward dice, wine, and women; only from these three things all his confusion springs. The third derivative of delicacy is sloth, of which I will say a word or two, and so shake hands with all the sons and daughters of pride. Security, the last divident of delicacy, it includeth in it, for security is nothing but the effect of sloth; therefore will I handle both under one. It is a sin which is good for nothing but to be Dame Lechery’s keeper when she lies in. He or she that is possessed with sloth is slow in good works, slow in coming to sermons, slow in looking after thrift, slow in resisting temptations, slow in defending any good cause. And of these forslowers it is said, Those that be neither hot nor cold, I will spew them out of my mouth. Revela. the 3.
Job 6.
There is a certain kind of good sloth, as to be slow to anger, slow to judgement, slow to revenge. But there is a sloth unto judgement which is also an ill sloth. As when a poor man’s cause hangs so long in court ere it can be decided, that through the judge’s sloth he is undone with the following of it. There is a sloth also in punishing sin, as when magistrates will have their eyes put out with gifts, and will not see it, but wink at it, till they be broad-waked with the general cry of the commonwealth. There is a sloth of soldiery, as of those that come from the wars and will not fall to anything afterward, but cozen, beg and rob. There is a sloth of the ministry, as of those that after they be beneficed will never preach. Doth the wild ass bray, saith Job, when he hath grass, or loweth the ox when he hath fodder? No more do a great sort of our divines after they have living. They have learned to spare their tongues against they are to plead for greater preferment. So have a number of lawyers learned to spare their ears, against golden advocates come to plead to them. They cannot hear except their ears be rubbed with the
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oil of angels; they must have a spur to prick on an old dog, a few spurrials to remedy deafness.
Esay 30.
Guido in musica.
Others there are (though not of the same order) that can never hear but when they are flattered, & they cry continually to their preachers, Loquere nobis placentia, loquere nobis placentia. Speak to us nothing but pleasing things. And even as Archabius the trumpeter had more given him to cease them to sound (the noise that he made was so harsh), so will they give them more to cease than to sound, to corrupt them than to make them sound, to feed their sores than to launch them. The noise of judgements which they pronounce soundeth too harsh in their ears. They must have Orpheus’ melody, whom the Ciconian women tore in pieces because with his music he corrupted and effeminated their men. Guido saith there are certain devils that can abide no music; these are contrary devils, for they delight in nothing but the music of flattery. Moving words please them, but they hear them but as a passion in a play, which maketh them ravishedly melancholy, and ne’er renteth the heart. The delicacy both of men & women in London will enforce the Lord to turn all their plenty to scarcity, their tunes of wantonness to the alarums of war, and to leave their house desolate unto them.
Jerem. 9 Jerem. 5. Ezek. 3.
Math. 21:19.
Math. 20:19.
How the Lord hath begun to leave our house desolate unto us, let us enter into the consideration thereof with ourselves. At this instant is a general plague dispersed throughout our land. No voice is heard in our streets but that of Jeremy, Call for the mourning women, that they may come and take up a lamentation for us, for death is come into our windows, and entered into our palaces. God hath stricken us, but we have not sorrowed; of his heaviest correction we make a jest. We are not moved with that which he hath sent to amaze us; as it is in Ezekiel, They will not hear thee, for they will not hear me, so they will not, nor cannot, hear God in his visitation which have refused to hear him in his preachers. For your contempt and neglect of hearing God’s preachers, even as St. John Baptist said there was one come into the world more mighty than he, that carried his fan in his hand, so say I there is one come into the world more mighty than the word preached, which is the Lord in this present visitation; he carrieth his fan in his hand to purge his floor. All the chaff of carnal gospellers, that are blown from him with every wind of vanity or adversity, he shall purge from amongst you. A time of springing and growing have we had; now is our merciful father come to demand fruit of us. The fruit of faith, the fruit of good works, the fruit of patience and long suffering. If he find no fruit on us, he will say to us as he said to the fig-tree on which he found nothing but leaves, Never fruit grow on thee henceforward. And incontinent it withered, and incontinent death shall seize on us. From the mouth of the Lord I speak it, Except in time you convert, and bring forth the fruits of good life, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth worthy fruits thereof. With the two blind men that sat by the highway side when Christ came from Jericho we have cried a long time, Lord, have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us, O son of David, have mercy upon us, and lo, our eyes have been opened, the light of the gospel hath appeared unto us, but (like those blind men) after our eyes were
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opened, after the light of the gospel hath appeared unto us, we have refused to follow Christ.
Jerem. 23. Esay 24. Jerem. 12.
Jerem. 21. Jerem. 19.
You usurers and engrossers of corn, by your hoarding up of gold and grain till it is mould, rusty, moth-eaten and almost infects the air with the stench, you have taught God to hoard up your iniquities and transgressions till moldiness, putrefaction and mustiness enforceth him to open them, and being opened, they so poison the air with their ill savour that from them proceedeth this perilsome contagion. The land is full of adulterers, & for this cause the land mourneth. The land is full of extortioners, full of proud men, full of hypocrites, full of murderers. This is the cause why the sword devoureth abroad, and the pestilence at home. Wicked deeds have prevailed against us. How long (saith Jeremy) shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of the inhabitants that dwell therein? Our land mourns for the sickness, the herbs of the field have withered for want of rain, yet will no man depart from his wickedness. Post over the plague to what natural cause you will, I positively affirm it is for sin. For sin (said the Lord by the forenamed Jeremy) I will smite the inhabitants of Jerusalem and man and beast shall die of a great pestilence. I will bring a plague upon you, that whosoever heareth of it, his ears shall tingle. Either take away the cause, or there is no removing of the effect. London, thou are the seeded garden of sin, the sea that sucks in all the scummy channels of the realm. The honestest in thee (for the most) are either lawyers or usurers. Deceit is that which advanceth the greater sort of thy chiefest; let them look that their riches shall rust and canker, being wet & dewed with orphans’ tears. The Lord thinketh it were as good for him to kill with the plague as to let them kill with oppression. He beholdeth from on high all subtle conveyances and recognizances. He beholdeth how they pervert foundations, and will not bestow the bequeathers’ free alms but for bribes, or for friendship. I pray God they take not the like course in preferring poor men’s children into their hospitals, and converting the impotents’ money to their private usury. God likewise beholdeth how, to beguile a seely young gentleman of his land, they will crouch cap in hand, play the brokers, bawds, apron-squires, panders, or anything. Let us leave off the proverb which we use to a cruel dealer, saying, Go thy ways, thou art a Jew, and say, Go thy ways, thou art a Londoner. For than Londoners are none more hardhearted and cruel. Is it not a common proverb amongst us, when any man hath cozened or gone beyond us, to say he hath played the merchant with us? But merchants, they turn it another way, and say he hath played the gentleman with them. The snake eateth the toad, and the toad the snail. The merchant eats up the gentleman, the gentleman eats up the yeoman, and all three do nothing but exclaim one upon another.
Dan. 2:23.
The head of Daniel’s image was of beaten gold, but his feet iron. Our head or our sovereign is all gold, golden in her looks, golden in her thoughts, in her words and deeds golden. We, her feet or her subjects, all iron. Though for her virtue’s sake, and the prayers of his dispersed congregation, God prorogueth our desolation for awhile, yet we must not think but at one time or other he will smite us and plague us. He shall not take away our sin because we will not confess, with David, that we have sinned, or if we do so
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confess, we hold it full satisfaction of it without any reformation or amendment. In this time of infection we purge our houses, our bodies, and our streets, and look to all but our souls. Psalm 76. Math. 8.
The psalmist was of another mind, for he said, O Lord, I have purged and cleansed my spirit. Blessed are they that are clean in heart, however their houses be infected. There were them in the heat of the sickness that thought to purge and cleanse their houses by conveying their infected servants forth by night into the fields, which there starved and died for want of relief and warm keeping. Such merciless cannibals (instead of purging their spirits and their houses) have thereby doubled the plague on them and their houses. In Gray’s Inn, Clerkenwell, Finsbury and Moorfields, with mine own eyes have I seen half a dozen of such lamentable outcasts. Their brethren & their kinsfolks have offered large sums of money to get them conveyed into any outhouse, and no man would earn it, no man would receive them. Cursing and raving by the highway side have they expired, & their masters never sent to them, nor succoured them. The fear of God is come amongst us, and the love of God gone from us. If Christ were not naked and visited, naked and visited should he be, for none would come near him. They would rather forswear him and defy him than come within forty foot of him. In other lands they have hospitals whither their infected are transported, presently after they are stricken. They have one hospital for those that have been in the houses with the infected and are not yet tainted, another for those that are tainted and have the sores risen on them, but not broken out. A third, for those that both have the sores, & have them broken out on them. We have no provision but mixing hand over head the sick with the whole. A halfpenny a month to the poor man’s box we count our utter impoverishing. I have heard travellers of credit avouch that in London is not given the tenth part of that alms in a week which in the poorest besieged city of France is given in a day. What, is our religion all avarice and no good works? Because we may not build monasteries, or have masses, dirges, or trentals sung for our souls, are there no deeds of mercy that God hath enjoined us? Our dogs are fed with the crumbs that fall from our tables. Our Christian brethren are famished for want of the crumbs that fall from our tables. Take it of me, rich men expressly, that it is not your own which you have purchased with your industry; it is part of it the poor’s, part your prince’s, part your preacher’s. You ought to possess no more than will moderately sustain your house and your family. Christ gave all the victual he had to those that flocked to hear his sermons. We have no such promise-founded plea at the day of all flesh as that in Christ’s name we have done alms-deeds. How would we with our charity sustain so many mendicant orders of religions as we heretofore have, & as now at this very hour beyond sea are, if we cannot keep and cherish the casual poor amongst us? Never was there a simple liberal reliever of the poor but prospered in most things he went about. The cause that some of you cannot prosper is for you put out so little to interest to the poor. No thanksworthy exhibitions or reasonable pensions will you contribute to maimed soldiers or poor scholars, as other nations do, but suffer other nations with your
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discontented poor to arm themselves against you. Not half the priests that have been sent from them into England had hither been sent, or ever fled hence, if the cramp had not held close your purse-strings. The livings of colleges by you are not increased, but diminished; because those that first raised them had a superstitious intent, none of us ever after will have any Christian charitable intent. In the days of Solomon, gold and silver bare no price. In these our days (which are the days of Satan), naught but they bear any price. God is despised in comparison of them. Demas forsook Christ for the world; in this our deceasing covetous world, Demas hath more followers than Christ. An old usurer that hath ne’er an heir rakes up thirty or forty thousand pounds together in a hutch, will not part with a penny, fares miserably, dies suddenly, and leaves those the fruits of his niggardise to them that never thank him. He that bestoweth anything on a college or hospital, to the world’s end shall have his name remembered in daily thanksgiving to God for him; otherwise he perisheth as the pellitory on the wall or the weed on the house-top, that groweth only to wither; of all his wealth no good man reaping any benefit, none but cankers, prisons and barred chests live to report he was rich. Those great barred chests he carries on his back to heaven-gates, and none so burdened is permitted to enter. There is no male of any kind hath apparance of breasts but man, and he, having them, gives no suck with them at all. Such dry-nurses are our English curmudgeons; they have breasts, but give no suck with them. They have treasure innumerable, but do no good with it. All the abbey-lands that were the abstracts from impertinent alms now scarce afford a meal’s meat of alms. A penny bestowed on the poor is abridged out of housekeeping. All must be for their children that spend more than all. More prosperous children should they have were they more open-handed. The plague of God threatens to shorten both them and their children because they shorten their hands from the poor. To no cause refer I this present mortality but to covetise. Let covetise be enlarged out of durance, the infected air will uncongeal, and the wombs of the contagious clouds will be cleansed. Pray and distribute, you gorbellied mammonists; without prayer and distribution, or almost thinking of God, have you congested those refulgent masses of substance. With the distribution of them (if you look for salvation), your souls must you ransom from Belial. And fortunate are you, if with tedious intercessions and prayers you may get your ransom accepted of. Nothing of all your dross (going down into the earth) shall you take with you; you shall carry no more hence, nisi parua quod urna capit, but a coffin and a winding-sheet. Psalm 75.
They have slept their sleep, saith David, and all the men of riches have found none of their treasure in their own hands after their sleep was ended. Poor men, to you I speak (for rich men have their country granges to fly to from contagion), humble your souls with fasting and prayer. Elias and Moses by their fasting and prayer were filled with the familiarity of God. Entreat the Lord that he would pass over your houses, as in Egypt he passed over the houses of the Isaraelites’ first-born; beseech him, with the Gergesenes (into whose herds of swine the devils were sent), to depart (with his heavy judgements)
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out of your quarters. Though he seemeth a little to sleep (as when he was on the sea with his disciples, and the tempest arose), yet if you awake him with your outcrying prayers, as the apostles did, saying, Lord, save us; Lord, save us, or we perish, he will command the winds and the sea, control the contagion and the sickness, and make a calm ensue, heal every disease and languor amongst you. Psalm 77.
Hebr. 12.
In the day of my trouble (saith the forenamed prophetical king), I sought unto the Lord; my sore ran, & ceased not in the night, my soul refused comfort. I did think upon God, and was troubled; I prayed, and my spirit was full of anguish. Let us seek unto the Lord in like sort, let our souls refuse comfort, let us think upon him & be troubled, let us pray, and fill our spirits full of anguish till such time as he turneth our affliction from us. If we be not thus troubled, if our spirits be not possessed with anguish, but we make a sport and flea-biting of his fearful visitation, and think (without our prayers) the season of the year will cease it, he will send a rougher-stringed scourge amongst us, a desolation that shall furrow deeper in our sides, and root out the memorial of us. If (saith the apostle to the Hebrews) they escaped not which refused him that spake on earth, much more shall they not escape that turn away from him that speaketh to them from heaven. Now it is that God speaketh to us from heaven; now if we turn away from him, or will not turn to him, there shall not one of us escape. In the time of Gregory Nazianzen (if we may credit ecclesiastical records), there sprung up the direfullest mortality in Rome that mankind hath been acquainted with; scarce able were the living to bury the dead, and not so much but their streets were digged up for graves, which this holy Father (with no little commiserate heart-bleeding) beholding, commanded all the clergy (for he was at that time their chief bishop) to assemble in prayer and supplications, & deal forcingly beseeching with God to intermit his fury, and forgive them. For all this, not any whit it abated; he took no pity on them. Therewith that reverend pastor (entranced to hell in his thoughts for the distress of his people) caused all the citizens, young and old, to be called forth their houses, and attend him in a howling procession. Up and down the streets, from one end of the city to the other he led them, and preachers (as captains over multitudes) were set to direct & encourage them in their invocations and orisons. Four days together in this fervent exercise he detained them. In those places where the mortality raged most, a stand would he make half a day, and with reiterated solicitings, and prostrate voice-crazing vehemency, break ope a broad cloud-dispersing passage to the throne of mercy. The four days concluded, and that with their bellowing clamours and breast-embolning sighs they had enforced a sufficient breach in the firmament, there appeared a bright sunarrayed angel, standing with a reeking bloody sword in his hand in the chief gate of their city, which (they coming near), in all their sights, on his arm he wiped and put up, and (in that very instant) throughout the city the plague ceased. Some (peradventure) may take exceptions against the certainty hereof, but if we will authorize anything in the Roman or ecclesiastical histories, we must ascribe truth as well unto this. I would see him that could give me any other reason but this of the building of the yet extant gate and Castle
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of S. Angelos, on both which the angel with his sword drawn is artificially engraven. True, or not true, the example can do no harm; we will not be too hasty to imitate it. Instead of humbling ourselves after this manner, and wearying God with our cries and lamentations, we fall a-drinking and bousing, & making jests of his frowning castigation. As babes smile and laugh in their sleep, so we (surprised with a lethargy of sin) do nothing but laugh and jest in the midst of our sleepy security. We scoff and are jocund, when the sword is ready to go through us. On our wine-benches we bid a fico for ten thousand plagues.
Hebr. 12:5.
Job 5:17.
Him as a timorous milksop we deride, that takes any antidote against it. Upon the point of God’s sword we will run as he is in striking, rush into houses that are infected, as it were to outface him. My son (saith the apostle), despise not the chastisement of the Lord. The Lord’s chastising we think to escape, by despising it. Quod in communi possidetur, ab omnibus negligitur. That which is dispersed, of all is despised. Est tentatio adducens peccatum, et tentatio probans fidem. There is a temptation leading to sin, and a temptation trying our faith. The temptation of this our visitation hath both led us to sin, and tried our faith. It hath led us to sin in that it hath hardened our hearts, & we have not humbled ourselves under it as we should. It hath tried our faith to be a presumptuous and rash faith, and that it is built on no firm foundation. Blessed is the man, saith Job, whom God correcteth. Cursed are we, for God correcteth us and we regard it not. As the Holy Ghost willeth us not to despise the chastising of God, so he would have us not to faint when we are rebuked of him, and thereof he giveth a reason, For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth, and he scourgeth every son he receiveth. As there be drunken despisers of God’s present chastisement, so are there them that faint too much under it, that think it lies not in the Lord’s power to restore them, that no prayers or repentance may reprieve them, that imagine (since God in this world hath forsook them) he will forever forsake them. Thus they argument against themselves: He that denieth us a small request of the prolongment of a few earthly days, he will surely stop his ears when in a greater suit (for the life eternal) we shall importune him. O no, foolish men, you err; though long life on earth be a blessing, yet it follows not by contradiction, that God curseth all those whose days he shortens. Many, except their days were shortened, would never be saved. Many in their prime and best years are raught hence because the world is unworthy of them, and they are more worthy of heaven than the world. The good King Josias was taken away in his youth. Our Saviour was taken up in his best youthly age. Others for their sins the Lord by untimely death punisheth in this world, that they may be absolved in the world to come. A large account of them shall he demand to whom he lendeth long life. Whom God chastiseth or cutteth off, he loveth; half his account he cuts off. Every son he scourgeth that he receiveth. Hath God chastised or scourged such a man by the sickness, he is not a greater sinner than thou whom he hath not chastised, but he loveth him better than thee, for in his chastising he hath showed more care over him than he hath over thee. Few men defamed with any notorious vice can I hear of that have died of this sickness. God chastiseth his
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Heb. 12:8, 9.
sons and not bastards. No sons of God are we, but bastards, until we be chastened. The fathers of our earthly bodies for a few days chastise us at their pleasure, but God chastiseth us for our profit, that we may be partakers of his holiness. The fathers of our earthly bodies, though they beat us and chastise us, yet cannot (for all the pain they put us to) enfeoff us in glory perpetual, for how should they do that for us which they cannot do for themselves? Only because they are to benefit us with a little transitory chaff, they tyrannize and reign over us, and therefore more austere are they to keep us in obedience, for we should not (after their death) lavishly mis-spend the labours of their parsimony. The guerdon they give us (for all their inflicted sorrow and smart) is that which they must leave in spite of their hearts, & cannot themselves keep any longer. They give us place, that in selfsame sort we may give place to others. But God, our redeemer, chastiser, and father, corrects us that we may receive no corruptive inheritance (such as in this life we receive by the waning of our earthly fathers), but a never-failing inheritance, where we shall have our father himself for our inheritance. O, what a blessed thing is it to be chastised of the Lord. Is it not better (O, London) that God correct thee and love thee, than forbear thee and forsake thee? He is a just God, and must punish either in this life or in the life to come. Though thou considerest only the things before thee, yet he, being a loving foreseeing father for thee, and knowing the intolerableness of the never-quenched furnace (which for sin he hath prepared), will not consent to thine own childish wishes of winking at thee here on earth (where though he did spare thee, thou shouldst have no perfect tranquillity), but with a short light punishment acquitteth thee from the punishment eternal & eternally incomprehensible torturous. When preachers threaten us for sin with this adjunct eternal, as pains eternal, eternal damnation, eternal horror and vexation, we hear them as words of course, but never dive right down into their bottomless sense. A confused model and misty figure of hell have we conglomerate in our brains, drowsily dreaming that it is a place under earth, uncessantly vomiting flames like Aetna or Mongibel, and fraught full of fire & brimstone, but we never follow the meditation of it so far (were it nothing else) as to think what a thing it is to live in it perpetually. It is a thousand thousand times worser than to be staked on the top of Aetna or Mongibel. A hundred thousand thousand times more than thought can attract, or supposition apprehend. But eternally to live in it, that makes it the hell, though the torment were but trifling. Signified this word eternal but some six thousand years (which is about the distance from Adam), in our comprehension it were a thing beyond mind, insomuch as we deem it an impatient spectacle to see a traitor but half an hour groaning under the hangman’s hands. What then is it to live in threescore times more griding discruciament of dying a year, a hundred year, a thousand year, six thousand year, sixty thousand year, more thousands than can be numbered in a thousand years? So much importeth this word eternal, or forever.
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Though all the men that ever God made were hundred-handed like Briareus, and should all at once take pens in their hundred hands, and do nothing in a whole age together but set down in figures & characters as many millions or thousands as they could, so many millions or thousands could they never set down as this word of three syllables, eternal, includeth; an ocean of ink would it draw dry to describe it. Hell is a circle which hath no breakings off, or discontinuing. Hence blasphemous witches and conjurers, when they raise up the devil, draw a ringed circle all about him, that he should not rush out and oppress them, as also to humble & debase him in putting him in mind, by that circle, of the eternal circle of damnation wherein God hath confined and shut him. What dullards and blockheads are we, that hearing these terms of hell and eternal so often sound in our ears, sound them so shallowly, or if we sound them as we should, are no more confounded with them! It should seem we are not too much terrified with them, when for an hour’s pleasure (which hath no taste of true pleasure in it), we will dare them both to their utmost. Fowls of the air, though never so empty-stomached, fly not for food into open pitfalls. Quae nimis apparent retia vitat avis, Too open snares even simple birds do shun. No beast of the forest, spying a gin or a trap laid for him, but eschews it. We spy and foresee the pitfall, the net, the gin, the trap that Satan (our old entrapper) lays for us, yet wilfully we (without any flattering hope of food, without any excellent allurement to entice us, or hunger to constrain us) with full race will dart ourselves into them. Yea, though Christ from the skies hold out never so moving lures unto us, all of them (haggard-like) we will turn tail to, and haste to the iron fist that holds out naught but a knife to enthrill us. O, if there were no heaven, methinks (having that understanding we ought) we should forbear to sin, if it were but for fear of hell. Our laws, with nothing but proposed penalty, from offending cohibit us; they allow no reward to their temperate observants; God’s laws (proposing both exceeding reward and exceeding penalty) are every day violated and infringed. Either we suppose him not able to execute his laws, or that (like one of Rome’s epicure emperors) he more favoureth their breakers than obeyers, advancing men sooner for oppugning than observing them. Far is he from that madbrain fondness; of his laws he is not only not careless, but jealous and zealous, and to the fourth generation pursueth their neglecters. None of them he pardons, though for a space he may respite. If he delayeth or respiteth, his delaying or respiting is but to fetch up his hand higher, that he may let it fall on them heavier. His deferring is the more to infer. Of no ill payment shall he complain that hath the wages of his wickedness held from him in this world, to receive them by the whole sum in hell. Could the least and senselessest of our senses into the quietest corner of hell be transported in a vision but three minutes, it would breed in us such an agasting terror, and shivering mislike of it, that to make us more wary of sin-meriting it, we would have it painted in our gardens, our banqueting-houses, on our gates, in our galleries, our closets, our bed-chambers. Again, were there no hell but the accusing of a man’s own conscience, it were hell and the profundity of hell, to any sharp-transpiercing soul that had never so little inkling of
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the joys of heaven, to be separate from them, to hear and see triumphing and melody, and, Tantalus-like, not be suffered to come near them or partake them, to think when all else were entered, he should be excluded. Our best method to prevent this excluding or separating from God’s presence is here on earth (whatsoever we go about) to think we see him present. Let us fancy the firmament as his face, the all-seeing sun to be his right eye, and the moon his left (although his eyes are far more fiery-pointed and subtle), that the stars are but the congemmed twinklings of those his clear eyes, that the winds are the breath of his nostrils, and the lightning & tempests the troubled action of his ire, that his frowns bring forth frost & snow, and his smiles fair weather, that the winter is the image of the first world wherein Adam was unparadised, & the fruit-fostering summer the representation of the seed of woman’s satisfying for the unfortunate fruit of life which he plucked. Who is there entertaining these divine allusive cogitations that hath not God unremovable in his memory? He that hath God in his memory, and advanceth him before his eyes evermore, will be bridled and plucked back from much abusion and bestialness. Many sins be there, which if none but man should over-eye us offending in, we would never exceed or offend in. In the presence of his prince, the dissolutest misliver that lives will not offend or misgovern himself; how much more ought we (abiding always in God’s presence) precisely to straighten our paths? Hard is it when we shall have our judge an eye-witness against us. There is no demurring or exceptioning against his testimony. Purblind London, neither canst thou see that God sees thee, nor see into thyself. How long wilt thou cloud his earthly prospect with the misty night of thy mounting iniquities? Therefore hath he smitten thee and struck thee, because thou wouldest not believe he was present with thee. He thought, if nothing else might move thee to look back, at least thou wouldest look back to thy striker. Had it not been so to cause thee to look back & repent, with no cross or plague would he have visited or sought to call thee. He could have been revenged on thee superabundantly at the day of thy dissolution & soul’s general law-day, though none of thy children or allies by his hand had been sepulchred. His hand I may well term it, for on many that are arrested with the plague is the print of a hand seen, and in the very moment it first takes them, they feel a sensible blow given them, as it were with the hand of some stander-by. As God’s hand we will not take it, but the hand of fortune, the hand of hot weather, the hand of close smouldery air. The astronomers, they assign it to the regiment and operation of planets. They say Venus, Mars or Saturn are motives thereof, and never mention our sins, which are his chief procreators. The vulgar menialty conclude therefore it is like to increase, because a heronshaw (a whole afternoon together) sat on the top of St. Peter’s Church in Cornhill. They talk of an ox that tolled the bell at Woolwich, & how from an ox he transformed himself to an old man, and from an old man to an infant, & from an infant to a young man. Strange prophetical reports (as touching the sickness) they mutter he gave out, when in truth they are naught else but cleanly coined lies which some pleasant sportive wits have devised to gull them most grossly. Under Master Dee’s name the like fabulous divinations have they bruited, when (good reverend old man) he is as far from any such arrogant prescience as the superstitious spreaders of it are from peace of conscience.
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Jerem. 3:22.
If we would hunt after signs and tokens, we should ominate from our hardness of heart and want of charity amongst brethren that God’s justice is hard entering. No certainer conjecture is there of the ruin of any kingdom than their revolting from God. Certain conjectures have we had that we are revolted from God, and that our ruin is not far off. In divers places of our land it hath rained blood, the ground hath been removed, and horrible deformed births conceived. Did the Romans take it for an ill sign when their Capitol was stricken with lightning, how much more ought London to take it for an ill sign when her chief steeple is stricken with lightning? They with thunder from any enterprise were disanimated, we nothing are amated. The blazing star, the earthquake, the dearth and famine some few years’ since, may nothing affright us. Let us look for the sword next, to remembrance and warn us. As there is a time of peace, so is there a time of war. No prosperity lasteth always. The Lord by a solemn oath bound himself to the Jews, yet when they were oblivious of him, he was oblivious of the covenant he made with their forefathers, and left their city desolate unto them. Shall he not then (we starting from him, to whom by no bond he is tied) leave our house desolate unto us? Shall we receive of God (a long time) all good, and shall we not look in the end to receive of him some ill? O ye disobedient children, return, and the Lord shall heal your infirmities. Lie down in your confusion, & cover your faces with shame. From your youth to this day have you sinned, and not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God. Now, in the age of your obstinacy and ungrateful abandonments, repent and be converted. With one united intercessionment, thus reconcile yourselves unto him. O Lord, our refuge from one generation to another, whither from thy sight shall we go, or whither, but to thee, shall we fly from thee? Just is thy wrath; it sendeth no man to hell unjustly. Rebuke us not in thine anger, neither chastise us in thy displeasure. We have sinned, we confess, & for our sins thou hast plagued us; with the sorrows of death thou hast compassed us, & thy snares have overtook us; out of nature’s hand hast thou wrested the sword of fate, and now slayest everyone in thy way. Ah, thou preserver of men, why hast thou set us up as a mark against thee? Why wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro with the wind, & pursue the dry stubble? Return & show thyself marvellous upon us. None have we like Moses, to stand betwixt life & death for us. None to offer himself to die for the people, that the plague may cease. O dear Lord, for Jerusalem didst thou die, yet couldst not drive back the plagues destinate to Jerusalem. No image or likeness of thy Jerusalem on earth is there left, but London. Spare London, for London is like the city that thou loved’st. Rage not so far against Jerusalem, as not only to desolate her, but to wreak thyself on her likeness also. All the honour of thy miracles thou losest, which thou hast showed so many and sundry times in rescuing us with a strong hand from our enemies, if now thou becomest our enemy. Let not worldings judge thee inconstant, or undeliberate in thy choice, in so soon rejecting the nation thou hast chosen. In thee we hope beyond hope. We have no reason to pray to thee to spare us, and yet have we no reason to spare from prayer, since thou hast willed us. Thy will be done, which willeth not the death of any sinner. Death, let it kill sin in us, and reserve us to praise thee. Though thou kill’st us, we will praise thee, but more praise shalt thou reap by preserving than killing, since it is the only praise to preserve where thou may’st kill. With the leper we cry out, O Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make us clean. We claim thy promise, that those which mourn shall be comforted.
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Comfort us, Lord; we mourn, our bread is mingled with ashes, and our drink with tears. With so many funerals are we oppressed, that we have no leisure to weep for our sins for howling for our sons and daughters. O, hear the voice of our howling; withdraw thy hand from us, & we will draw near unto thee. Come, Lord Jesu, come, for as thou art Jesus, thou art pitiful. Challenge some part of our sin-procured scourge to thy cross. Let it not be said that thou but half satisfied’st for sin. We believe thee to be an absolute satisfier for sin. As we believe, so for thy merit’s sake we beseech thee let it happen unto us. Thus ought every Christian in London, from the highest to the lowest, to pray. From God’s justice we must appeal to his mercy. As the French King, Francis the First, a woman kneeling to him for justice, said unto her, Stand up, woman, for justice I owe thee; if thou beg’st anything, beg for mercy. So if we beg of God for anything, let us beg for mercy, for justice he owes us. Mercy, mercy, O grant us, heavenly Father, for thy mercy. Luctus monumenta manebunt.
Modern spelling edition copyright Nina Green October 2002.
